In two experiments involving a total of 83 participants, the effect of a vertical angular optical compression on the perceived distance and size of a target on the ground was investigated. Replicating an earlier report (Wallach & O’Leary, 1982), reducing the apparent angular declination below the horizon produced apparent object width increases (by 33%) consistent with the perception of a great...

Japanese dialects spoken in the Kinki and Shikoku regions have a lexical contrast of pitch register types called shiki. The shallow f0 downtrend in the high-pitched shiki type is thought of as a manifestation of backdrop f0 declination that is blind to tonal structure. Acoustic analysis of three Japanese dialects with 2or 3-way contrast of shiki types, however, reveals that the degree of f0 dec...

The visual abstraction procedure used in previous studies of declination was tested using 12 subjects who each fit the F0 contours of 19 spoken short simple sentences with baselines. These baselines were found to be poorly replicated the fitters. An objective all-points least-squares best-fit procedure was tested on this corpus and on a set of sentences that had been produced in both spontaneou...