{"id":974,"date":"2016-09-08T16:18:18","date_gmt":"2016-09-08T15:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/?p=974"},"modified":"2016-09-08T16:25:02","modified_gmt":"2016-09-08T15:25:02","slug":"was-neil-armstrong-misquoted-study-suggests-his-accent-couldve-been-to-blame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/2016\/09\/08\/was-neil-armstrong-misquoted-study-suggests-his-accent-couldve-been-to-blame\/","title":{"rendered":"Was Neil Armstrong misquoted? Study suggests his accent could\u2019ve been to blame"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article by Professor Ian McLoughlin<\/a> was first published\u00a0in The Conversation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one of the most famous quotes of all time. \u201cThat\u2019s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,\u201d were the first words NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered when he set foot on the moon at 02.56 GMT on July 21 1969.<\/p>\n

Or were they? Armstrong himself\u00a0has always insisted<\/a>\u00a0he said \u201cone small step for\u00a0a<\/em>\u00a0man\u201d not \u201cone small step for man\u201d. While the former is grammatically correct and meaningful, the latter is contradictory when coupled with \u201cmankind\u201d in the next part of the sentence.<\/p>\n

Try and judge for yourself by\u00a0listening to the recording<\/a>. Most people hear \u201cfor man\u201d. Assuming that Armstrong is correct in his claim (a reasonable assumption since he was the only one there\u00a0and by all accounts an honest and trustworthy individual<\/a>) \u2013 the reason most of us don\u2019t hear an \u201ca\u201d could be due to a combination of factors including the noisy radio link, the 250,000-mile distance, the stressful situation for the speaker affecting his speaking rate and his particular\u00a0North American Midwest accent<\/a>, where the \u201ca\u201d is naturally shortened and merged with the preceding word. Another factor is how our brains perceive speech. It is worth noting he also agreed the \u201ca\u201d was inaudible in recordings, but still maintained he had spoken it.<\/p>\n

In 2006,\u00a0news stories<\/a>\u00a0reported that audio analysis, including\u00a0spectrograms<\/a>\u00a0like those used for\u00a0voice prints<\/a>, had found the missing \u201ca\u201d, mysteriously hiding behind a burst of static. However subsequent\u00a0efforts by others<\/a>\u00a0failed to substantiate this story.<\/p>\n

Skip forward a decade, and\u00a0researchers in the US<\/a>\u00a0have finally shed some new light on the controversy. In some intriguing experiments published in PLOS-ONE, the team analysed a large number of recordings of Midwestern\u00a0American speech<\/a>, and also used a group of Midwestern listeners to investigate how the speakers said the phrases \u201cfor\u201d and \u201cfor a\u201d respectively \u2013 and how the listeners perceived them.<\/p>\n

Many recordings of Ohio residents speaking both phrases were analysed, and revealed that timing statistics for both versions overlapped so much that it was very often impossible to tell them apart. This means that whichever version Armstrong actually uttered, it would probably be indistinguishable anyway.<\/p>\n

The listeners were then presented with the recordings, including slowed down versions \u2013 because Armstrong\u2019s speech was actually spoken quite slowly. Interestingly, results showed that more people heard \u201cfor\u201d as opposed to \u201cfor a\u201d when the speech either side of the phrase was itself slow. This was probably because listeners expected all syllables to be lengthened proportionally, whereas the duration of the very brief \u201ca\u201d sound (which was relatively constant), became shorter in comparison to the lengthened syllables surrounding it.<\/p>\n

So if Armstrong did say \u201cfor a\u201d, it\u2019s quite likely many of us would still hear it as \u201cfor\u201d anyway, because of his accent, slow speech and unclear recording. We still don\u2019t know for certain what he said, but with these latest findings, the balance of probability now much more firmly supports his version of events.<\/p>\n

Auditory illusions and other quirks<\/h2>\n

So does it matter? Not to Armstrong, who left the Earth for good on August 25 2012. However it certainly feels appropriate to reaffirm the legacy of someone who was a hero to so many.<\/p>\n

It also illustrates some interesting speaking and hearing effects. Many\u00a0dialects<\/a>\u00a0have short single-syllable words that\u00a0fuse with<\/a>\u00a0the word before or after them when spoken and yet are highly intelligible. Or consider the Australian accent that some believe to be derived from the\u00a0heavy-drinking early settlement days as a kind of drunken drawl<\/a>, leaving behind just the most essential parts of words. Most of us seldom speak words one-by-one anyway, and often\u00a0flow our words into one another<\/a>\u00a0(relaxed pronunciation). Listening to accents or speakers we are familiar with, this works well, but can have amusing consequences when we listen to others.<\/p>\n

Did you ever try to guess unclear song lyrics and get the meaning completely wrong? You are not alone. This is called a\u00a0Mondegreen<\/a>\u00a0and turns out to be both frequent, as well as occasionally\u00a0quite hilarious<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is all due to the fact the human brain is amazingly good at filling in blanks by guessing information that is missing. If the\u00a0brain does not recognise speech that it is hearing<\/a>, it unconsciously searches for the closest match, and then \u201csnaps\u201d the meaning into place. We hear what the brain thinks is there, rather than what might actually be there. Auditory illusions, like optical illusions with sound, illustrate this.<\/p>\n

For example, listen to these examples of\u00a0sinewave speech<\/a>, which are acoustic signals from sinewaves that vary in frequency in the same pattern as speech. When first hearing SWS, we understand nothing. But listen to the original version of the speech recording, then try again. Like magic, the sinewave speech is suddenly intelligible as the brain now \u201chears\u201d it as speech.<\/p>\n

Phantom words<\/a>\u00a0are another illusion which arises when we hear continually repeated speech. They are the brain \u201cgrasping at straws\u201d as it tries to extract additional meaning from the syllables being heard.<\/p>\n

These are just a few of the exciting and fascinating aspects of speech, hearing and brain research that come together in the field of\u00a0psychoacoustics<\/a>, which has given us\u00a0MP3 music<\/a>,\u00a0mobile phone<\/a>\u00a0communications, and more great sounding\u00a0products<\/a>\u00a0that literally are one giant leap ahead of 1969.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article by Professor Ian McLoughlin was first published\u00a0in The Conversation. It\u2019s one of the most famous quotes of all time. \u201cThat\u2019s one small step … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5321,"featured_media":975,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[124,57908],"tags":[149987],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5321"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=974"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":979,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions\/979"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}