The present study focusses on how the frication noise and the vocalic formant transitions work together to attain the percept of intervocalic fricatives. The three voiceless fricatives /f/,/s/ and /j/ were investigated within the three symmetric vowel contexts /a:/,/u:/ and /i:/, using synthetic vowel-fricative-vowel (VFV) stimuli from an LPC-based speech editor. Three different experiments have been carried out to measure the influence of the frication noise solely, the influence of the vocalic formant transitions and the combined influence of these two cues. The results indicate that both act as primary and independent cues for the perception of unvoiced fricatives.