Bryan Gick and Arian Shamei on the astronomy-linguistics interface

Following up on an astronaut’s observation about what it’s like to speak after a return from space, faculty member Bryan Gick and doctoral student Arian Shamei researched the phonetic effects of space travel. They demonstrated that, in Arian’s words, freshly-returned astronauts “speak as if their tongues are effectively heavier.” In addition to being an early work on the astronomy-linguistics interface, this also turns out to be revealing about the nature of earthbound speech. The study appeared in Canadian Acoustics, and a brief interview of the two can be found on the Language Sciences website.