To shed light on the brain’s speech-planning processes, a tongue twister study conducted by researchers at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Francisco.
- Psychologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked the volunteers to say the sentence 10 times in a row, at a fast lick.
- The volunteers recorded different combinations of words (like “the top cop saw a cop top”) but the most challenging one was the phrase ‘Pad kid poured curd pulled cold’, while saying it, many of them clammed up and stopped talking altogether.
- The jumble of words “Pad kid poured curd pulled cold” sound nonsensical but it is the most tricky tongue twister ever, leaving tongue-tangling classics like “Peter piper and his peck of pickled pepper” and “She sells seashells by the seashore” in the dust.
Why scientists study tongue twisters?
- Scientists study speech errors such as tongue twisters to understand how the brain processes and plans speech.
- They study the two categories of tongue twisters: i) Simple lists of paired words. ii) Whole sentences.
This operation would assist in understanding that when things go wrong, how a typical, error-free operation would go and when certain combinations of sounds are spoken too quickly, people seem to lose control of their mouths.