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The fundamental frequency in speech shows many rapid variations, part of which determine the perceived shape of the pitch contour. This implies that the accuracy with which listeners perceive changes of F0 is more relevant to understanding the perception of intonation than the traditional just noticeable difference of F0 in speech. This study examines the sensitivity to differences in the amount of change of F0, upward (Experiment Ia) and downward (Experiment Ib). Subjects 74 and 104, respectively, with widely different musical ability can be divided into three categories: (1) Quite a number of them were not able to discriminate differences of less than 4 semitones (nondiscriminators); (2) other subjects wrongly tried to base their judgments on a simple comparison of the final pitches of a stimulus pair (final pitch discriminators); (3) the remaining subjects (pitch distance discriminators) yielded average jnd's of about 1.5 to 2 semitones. Since the issue is associated with musical interval sense, similar experiments were carried out using piano tones. The results were essentially the same as with the speech stimuli. The outcome suggests that only differences of more than 3 semitones play a part in communicative situations.

Declination is taken as the focus of studying pitch phenomena from an acoustic, physiological and perceptual point of view. It is shown that originally declination was no more than a theoretical construct to account for the interpretation of acoustic F₀ recordings. Recently, psycholinguistic considerations have enhanced the domain of application so as to account for this phenomenon. The literature is reviewed and the authors take issue over the various claims put forward by others, such as the dominance of the topline over the baseline approach, and the amount of pre-programming involved in declination, as manifested in its slope and in linguistically determined resetting.

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