COLUMBUS, Ohio – Those famous words spoken by astronaut Neil Armstrong when he set foot on the moon in 1969 may have been misquoted by people all these years.
Some have claimed the astronaut from Wapakoneta (above) said “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” but Armstrong and NASA have insisted he said “one small step for a man.”
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A study by researchers from OSU and Michigan State University appears to back that up and the authors of the study say an Ohio accent is to blame.
They studied how people from central Ohio pronounce “for” and “for a” and they found numerous examples of both sounding similar.
The results add credence to Armstrong’s claim, said Mark Pitt, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State.
One of his research partners at MSU, Laura Dilley, says it’s likely that exactly what he said will never be known.
Their findings will be presented Friday in Montreal at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics.
“Central Ohioans often blend the words “for” and “a” when they are spoken together. Under the best of conditions, it may be hard for a listener to tell if both words are spoken. And speaking from the moon is not the best of conditions,” said Pitt, who leads OSU’s Language Perception Laboratory.
Pitt and Dilley studied 191 recordings of people saying “for a” from the Buckeye Speech Corpus, which contains recordings of spontaneous speech from 40 people, and compared them to the same people saying “for” followed by a noun.
“These two words blend together heavily, and it is hard to tell where one word ends and the other begins or if both words are even being used,” Pitt said.