Tricky tongue twister tongue ties top talkers

Can you repeat this 10 times? “Pad kid poured curd pulled cold.”

It may not make much sense, but the tongue twister completely defeated volunteers taking part in a US speech study. Asked to repeat the phrase 10 times at a fast lick, many of the participants clammed up, lead researcher Dr Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

The tongue twister study, presented at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Francisco, was conducted to shed light on the brain’s speech-planning processes.