Alice in declinationland—A reply to Johan ’t Hart
PHILIP H. LIEBERMAN · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1986
The paper that ’t Hart disputes [Lieberman et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 77, 649–657 (1985)] refuted the general claim of declination theory, i.e., that the fundamental frequency always falls throughout an utterance. We are pleased to see that our paper has had the appropriate effect and that ’t Hart and other proponents of the declination theory have modified their stand and no longer hold to this extreme position. We did not claim that a lowering of fundamental frequency ‘‘only occurs in the terminal part of the utterance.’’ ’t Hart’s comments obscure the other points that we demonstrated in our paper. We showed that hand-drawn declination lines placed on F0 contours have different slopes when different observers draw them. To paraphrase a relevant line from Alice in Wonderland, hand-drawn declination lines can show anything you want them to show. The auditory matching procedure that ’t Hart uses in his own studies introduces additional possible errors that make his analyses almost meaningless.