In other words, the sound waves produced by “He bought it for a school” and “He bought one for school” are strikingly similar.īut this doesn’t tell us what Armstrong actually said on that July day in 1969. So we examined nearly 200 productions of “for” and 200 productions of “for a.” We found that the acoustics of the productions of each of these tokens were nearly identical. But in a recent study, my colleagues and I tried to get to the bottom of this.įirst, we explored how similar the speech signals are when a speaker intends to say “for” or “for a.” That is, could a production of “for” be consistent with the sound waves, or acoustics, of “for a,” and vice-versa? So can we ever really know whether Neil Armstrong uttered that little “a”?
#Who were the first man on the moon full
The audio of Armstrong’s first words on the Moon at full speed and half speed. But the original sound file was recorded 50 years ago, and the quality is pretty poor. Some have suggested that Armstrong definitely produced the infamous “a,” while others maintain that it’s unlikely or too difficult to tell. Over the years, researchers have tried to comb the audio files of Armstrong’s famous words, with mixed results. It can happen in everyday speech, and some have wondered if this is what happened in the case of Neil Armstrong. When singing or rapping, a lot of the speech cues we usually use are shifted to accommodate the song’s beat, which can end up jamming our default perception process. This is one reason why misheard song lyrics – called “ mondegreens” – are common. This is because there are little cues – like pitch and rhythm – that indicate when one word stops and the next begins.īut problems in speech perception can arise when those kinds of cues are missing, especially when pitch and rhythm are used for non-linguistic purposes, like in music. Yet listeners have little trouble determining word boundaries in real time. When people speak, there are typically very few pauses within a sentence.
Unlike writing, speech doesn’t have spaces between words. These processes are even more extraordinary when you think more closely about the properties of speech. Again, this happens nearly instantaneously, and errors rarely occur. We hear sounds, which we separate into speech and non-speech information, combine the speech sounds into words, and determine the meanings of these words. The process for listeners is equally complex and speedy. We do this quickly, producing, in English, around five syllables every second. When we talk, we formulate a thought, retrieve words from memory and move our mouths to produce sound.
Our extraordinary speech-processing abilitiesĭespite confusion over Armstrong’s words, speakers and listeners have a remarkable ability to agree on what is said and what is heard. In fact, I recently conducted a study on ambiguous speech, using Armstrong’s famous quote to try to figure out why and how we successfully understand speech most of the time, but also make the occasional mistake. As a linguist, I’m fascinated by mistakes between what people say and what people hear.
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