examine and say “ she betray ocean shells by the sea shore ” three times very fast . The first time might go alright , but on the second or third go - bout , chances are the word take off to degrade as you ’re tell them , fall apart in your lip like a crumbling Jenga tower .
Tongue twisters are nearly worldwide : Almost every nomenclature has its own idiomatic expression that turn people ’s mouths to mush .
There ’s an redundant turn to tongue twisters , though . In 1982 , husband - and - wife researchers Ralph and Lyn Haber ran anexperimentwhere college students silently record sentences containing tongue twisters and likewise complex sentences without them both silently and aloud . They find that the students train longer to mutely record the tongue tornado sentences than the ascendance ones . If tongue twisters slow down the great unwashed down and trip them up when they ’re reading them silently — other inquiry has shown that this is , again , nearly universal , even in logographic committal to writing system like Chinese , and when deaf people encounter tongue twister while reading — then the problem maybe is n’t in the tongue itself , but the wit .
Anotherexperimentby research worker at Carnegie Mellon University had mass silently show natural language - twist around sentences and dominance sentences while inside an MRI machine . The brain scans shew that tongue twister retard the content down and affected their inclusion of the sentences — and identify the different area of the genius activated during indication . The area affected indicate that tongue twisters cause problems in the planning , ascendence and/or representation of internal speech by creating a bottleneck in phonological ( link up to the figure of speech sound ) or articulatory processing that requires extra time and exertion to parse the sounds and dissolve the muddiness .
