Revisiting Neil Armstrongs Moon-Landing Quote: Implications for Speech Perception, Function Word Reduction, and Acoustic Ambiguity

Neil Armstrong insisted that his quote upon landing on the moon was misheard, and that he had said one small step for a man, instead of one small step for man. What he said is unclear in part because function words like a can be reduced and spectrally indistinguishable from the preceding context. Th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2016-09, Vol.11 (9), p.e0155975-e0155975
Main Authors: Baese-Berk, Melissa M, Dilley, Laura C, Schmidt, Stephanie, Morrill, Tuuli H, Pitt, Mark A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Acoustics
Ambiguity
Armstrong, Neil A
Astronauts
Biology and Life Sciences
Boundaries
Comprehension
Context
Engineering and Technology
Experiments
Extraterrestrial Environment
Function words
Humans
Hypotheses
Hypothesis testing
Linguistics
Lunar landing
Moon
Perception
Perceptions
Phonetics
Physical Sciences
Semantics
Social Sciences
Sound Spectrography
Speech
Speech - physiology
Speech Acoustics
Speech perception
Speech Perception - physiology
Speech rate
Spontaneous speech
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Summary:Neil Armstrong insisted that his quote upon landing on the moon was misheard, and that he had said one small step for a man, instead of one small step for man. What he said is unclear in part because function words like a can be reduced and spectrally indistinguishable from the preceding context. Therefore, their presence can be ambiguous, and they may disappear perceptually depending on the rate of surrounding speech. Two experiments are presented examining production and perception of reduced tokens of for and for a in spontaneous speech. Experiment 1 investigates the distributions of several acoustic features of for and for a. The results suggest that the distributions of for and for a overlap substantially, both in terms of temporal and spectral characteristics. Experiment 2 examines perception of these same tokens when the context speaking rate differs. The perceptibility of the function word a varies as a function of this context speaking rate. These results demonstrate that substantial ambiguity exists in the original quote from Armstrong, and that this ambiguity may be understood through context speaking rate.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0155975