After landing on the moon in 1969, many Americans remember Armstrong’s first phrase starting with “one small step for man.” But he reportedly insisted until his death that he said “one small step for a man.” Both Dilley and Baese-Berk, as well as two student assistants, took the issue as an opportunity to further research speech patterns.

“This historical event has captured so many people’s imaginations, and the quote has tremendous significance for how we remember this very momentous occasion,” Dilley said. “The fact that Neil Armstrong claimed until his death that he spoke the phrase another way than recorded was significant to us.”

The research became part of a larger project Dilley had been working on since 2007, which insisted that most English speakers blend words together in casual speech, making it more difficult to decipher individual words.

“One of the challenges is people talk really sloppily,” she said. “People routinely slur their words together; yet, a high proportion of the time, listeners can understand what is being said, and we’re trying to figure out why people are so successful at understanding speech.”

Using 40 speech examples from the Buckeye Corpus of conversational speech at Ohio State University, the four found that depending on how fast a person is speaking, it is possible for two or more words to be blended together and go undetected by the listener.

“Even when people are being very clear, there’s a lot of ambiguity in the speech signal,” Baese-Berk said. “If you’re looking at just the speech signal, there’s a lot of (confusion) about what is actually being said.”

The group also looked at Armstrong’s statement, speeding it up to see if the sound changed. Astrophysics sophomore Jesse Nagel, a student researcher on the project, said the simple adjustment changed everything.

“We sped up the words surrounding ‘for’ in context, and you almost hear space for an ‘a,’” Nagel said. “When you hear it, it goes against everything you thought about it before.”

Dilley said they hope to use their findings for computer speech recognition technology to help students with speech disorders improve their skills. The two presented their findings at a conference in Montreal last week, where their project was featured on “Anderson Live,” Anderson Cooper’s daytime show.

“In general, I think people like new scientific ways of answering an old question, especially an unresolved question,” Baese-Berk said. “It’s a nice real-world application of what the research is about.”

Nagel, as well as student researcher Stephanie Schmidt, also presented the findings at the University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum conference in April.

“It was really relatable to people,” Schmidt said. “In the grand scheme of things, it has a lot of relevance with being able to help people who might have speech disorders.”