Either way, moon landing was a big step.

• Position: Rhetoric - Neil Armstrong's words when landed on the moon - Brief article

You can blame astronaut Neil Armstrong's style of speech for the fact that people still wonder what he said as he became the first man to step on the moon. That is the conclusion of a study by researchers at Michigan State University, East Lansing, and Ohio State University, Columbus.

The researchers wanted to help answer the question of whether Armstrong said, as he claimed, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind"--or did Armstrong leave the word "a" out and say, "That's one small step for man ... "?

The results of this study add credence to Armstrong's contention, maintains Mark Pitt, coauthor of the study and professor of psychology. "Central Ohioans often blend the words 'for' and 'a' when they are spoken together," explains Pitt, who leads the OSU Language Perception Laboratory. "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."

The study involved data from the Buckeye Speech Corpus, which...