![\"tongue\"](\"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/files\/2014\/11\/tongue-.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nYou might remember doing some of these as a child as fun little games for kids to do at parties or in the lunchroom. However, from the perspective of a language researcher tongue twisters can actually help us understand how we produce language.<\/p>\n
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As we know, language is composed of words produced by sounds, thus the difficulties in accurately voicing tongue twisters shows how particular producing sound can be. Have you ever stopped to think about how you say a word or simply just a letter? Take the letter P for example, you might say \u201cPA,\u201d realize how pronouncing things actually entails multiple components. In order to produce sound your mouth needs to be in a very specific shape and there has to be a specific moment where sound is being released.<\/p>\n
Take for instance the difference of saying the letters P and B. Both of these letters are pronounced from movements coming from the lips and are followed by a release of air after being fully articulated. B and P are therefore basically this same sound except for a tiny difference in voice onset time, the instant the vibrations of articulating sound begins.<\/p>\n
These components can be found in\u00a0any letter. With letters D and T the only difference between these two sounds are a couple of milliseconds when the vocal cords are vibrating. However, you may notice that when pronouncing the letters D or T you are not using your lips to make the sound, rather the pressure of your tongue to the ceiling of your mouth. Other letters like G and K have sounds that are formed by movement occurring in the back of the throat. Hence we can see how the components of producing sound \u2013 place of articulation and time of voicing\u2014 allow us to articulate and differentiate different sounds when spoken.<\/p>\n
The more similar things that are being\u00a0pronounced are, the more likely you are to mix them up and make mistakes. Consequently, tongue twisters contain very similar sounds because that is what you\u2019re going to make mistakes on. Take for example, the tongue twister Sally Sells Sea Shells By The Sea Shore, you\u2019re switching between \u201csa,\u201d \u201cse,\u201d \u201csi\u201d and \u201cshe,\u201d very similar sounds. The similarity of the consonants sound’s impairs our ability\u00a0to quickly adjust our\u00a0production system to make all these similar sounds, especially when asked to pronounce repeatedly at a very fast pace.<\/p>\n
Therefore, the big question is whether errors people make in tongue twisters or even in normal speech, are driven by errors at the level of words (lexical) or at the smaller assembly parts, like sound and syllables (sub-lexical).<\/p>\n
To look at this, the authors Gollan and Goldrick tested participants with different degrees of experience, monolinguals and bilinguals who have more or less experience with a given language. On average bilinguals have less experience with one language because they are splitting their language usage across two, assuming people talk for the same amount of time. For example, bilinguals will be using English and Spanish 50% of the time where monolinguals will use English 100% of the time. The study included non-word tongue twisters because they don\u2019t have lexical information in order to determine if errors are made at lexical or sub-lexical level. Errors with non-word tongue twisters would suggest that it is because of the sub-lexical processes.<\/p>\n
Try reading the following examples of tongue twisters that were presented in the study as fast as you can three times:<\/p>\n