Shanghai Chinese has a complicated tone system conditioned by phonological onset voicing and syllable structure. Checked tones in Shanghai Chinese are acoustically realized with tenser phonation, shorter duration and a more central vowel space than their unchecked counterparts. The present study examines whether these cues also play a role in speech perception. A three-alternative forced-choice experiment was conducted in which 40 native listeners chose among three Chinese characters representing an open /CV/, a nasal-ending /CVN/ and a glottal-ending /CVɁ/ syllable according to the word they heard. Results show main effects of phonation type, vowel quality and duration as well as the interaction between the former two, on both decisions and reaction time. For reaction time, two-way interactions between duration and the other two cues were also detected. From the non-overlapping confidence intervals of the three main effects we tentatively conclude that tenser phonation is the primary perceptual cue to checked tones, while a more central vowel space and shorter duration are secondary, in line with findings in other tonal languages like Vietnamese and Cantonese. Additionally, we found that the low vowel pair /ɐ/ and /ɑ/ and high register tones tend to bias perception towards checked tones.