Buzz
Try saying “she sells sea shells by the sea shore” at top speed three times. The first attempt might be manageable, but by the second or third try, the words will likely begin to stumble, falling apart in your mouth like a fragile Jenga tower.
Tongue twisters exist all around the world: Nearly every language has its own tricky phrases that twist the tongue and confuse the mouth.
However, there’s a surprising twist to tongue twisters. In 1982, researchers Ralph and Lyn Haber conducted an experiment where college students read sentences with tongue twisters and equally complex sentences without them, both silently and aloud. They discovered that students took longer to read the tongue twister sentences silently compared to the control ones. If tongue twisters slow people down and trip them up in silent reading—something that research shows happens universally, even in writing systems like Chinese, and for deaf people reading—then perhaps the issue lies not in the tongue, but in the brain.
In another study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, participants read tongue-twisting and control sentences while inside an MRI scanner. The brain scans revealed that tongue twisters not only slowed the participants down but also impacted their understanding of the sentences. The scans pinpointed specific areas of the brain that were activated during reading, suggesting that tongue twisters cause challenges in planning, controlling, or representing internal speech. This creates a bottleneck in phonological or articulatory processing, requiring extra time and effort to untangle the sounds and resolve the confusion.
