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. 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.
Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, United States of America.
Melissa M
MM
Baese-Berk
Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America.
Laura C
LC
Dilley
Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America.
Stephanie
S
Schmidt
Program in Linguistics, Department of English, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.
Tuuli H
TH
Morrill
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States of America.
Mark A
MA
Pitt
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D018480:Astronauts; D032882:Comprehension; D005118:Extraterrestrial Environment; D006801:Humans; D016081:Moon; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*