When he took the first step, he said something that will go down in history forever: "This is a small step for mankind. This is a great leap for mankind.
Or at least that's what the media reported.
But Armstrong insisted that he was actually saying, "This is one small step for a man." In fact, in the official record of the mission to the moon, NASA translated this sentence as "this is a small step for mankind"
As a linguist, I am interested in the errors between what people say and what they hear.
In fact, I recently conducted a study on fuzzy language, using Armstrong's famous words, trying to find out why and how to successfully understand most speeches, but occasionally I make mistakes.
Our extraordinary speech processing ability Although Armstrong's words are puzzling, the speaker and audience have an extraordinary ability to agree on what they say and hear.
When we speak, we form a kind of thinking, extract words from memory and make sounds by moving our mouths. We did it quickly. In English, we pronounce about five syllables every second.
The audience's process is equally complex and rapid. We hear sounds, and we divide them into phonetic and non-phonetic information, combine them into words, and determine the meanings of these words. Again, this happens almost instantaneously, with few mistakes.
These processes are even more unusual when you think more carefully about the characteristics of language. Unlike writing, there are no spaces between words. When people speak, there are usually few pauses in sentences.
However, it is almost impossible for listeners to determine word boundaries in real time. This is because there are few hints like pitch and rhythm to indicate when a word stops and starts.
However, when these clues are missing, there will be problems in speech perception, especially when pitch and rhythm are used for non-verbal purposes, such as music. This is one of the reasons why the lyrics called "mondegreens" are wrong. When singing or rap, many voice prompts we usually use will be converted to adapt to the rhythm of the song, which may interfere with our default perception process.
But it's not just the lyrics that are wrong. This may happen in everyday speech, and some people wonder whether it is the same in neil armstrong.
After studying Armstrong's mixed signal for many years, researchers tried to sort out the audio files of Armstrong's famous words, and the results were mixed. Some people think that Armstrong did create the infamous "A", while others think it is impossible or too difficult to distinguish. But the original sound file was recorded 50 years ago, and the quality is very poor.
So we can really know whether neil armstrong said a little "A".
Probably not. But in a recent study, my colleagues and I tried to find out this.
First, we discuss the similarity of speech signals when the speaker intends to say "for" or "for a". That is to say, is the generation of "for" consistent with the sound wave or acoustics of "for a" and vice versa?
So we checked nearly 200 "for" and 200 "A" products. We found that the acoustics of these token products are almost the same. In other words, the sound waves produced by "what he bought for school" and "what he bought for school" are strikingly similar.
But it doesn't tell us what Armstrong said in July 1969. So we want to see if the audience sometimes misses me in phrases like Armstrong.
In this context, we want to know whether "A" is always perceived by the audience, even if it is explicitly produced. We found that in several studies, listeners often misheard short words, such as "a". When speaking at a speed comparable to Armstrong's
This is especially true when it is equally slow. In addition, we can manipulate whether people hear these short words by changing the speed of speech. So, maybe this is a perfect storm, which makes the audience misunderstand the original intention of this famous saying.
No "A" is an example of a challenge in speech and understanding. However, we can usually perceive and produce words quickly, easily and unconsciously. A better understanding of this process is especially useful when we are trying to help people with language or hearing impairment. This also enables researchers to better understand how adults learn these skills. They try to learn a new language, which in turn can help language learners to formulate more effective strategies.
Fifty years ago, when neil armstrong set foot on the moon, human beings changed. But he may not realize that his famous first word can also help us better understand how human beings communicate.
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Associate professor of linguistics, University of Oregon.
This article is reproduced from the conversation with permission of CreativeCommons. Read the original. "