The hardest tongue twister ever created?

25-679 AN:DECOUVERTES
12/02/14
9:35
Page 25
The hardest tongue twister
ever created?
THE INDEPENDENT
The hardest tongue
twister ever created?
L’exercice de diction le
plus difficile qui ait
jamais été créé
seashell coquillage / seashore littoral, rivage /
pad piaule, appart / to pour verser / curd lait
caillé, caillebotte / to pull tirer, ici servir / tongue
twister locution caractérisée par sa difficulté de
prononciation / phrase locution, expression / to
defeat vaincre, battre, ici mettre en échec, bloquer.
2. at speed à toute vitesse / altogether complètement / lead researcher directeur des
recherches / prize récompense.
3. to shed, shed, shed light on jeter la lumière
sur, expliquer / brain cerveau / error-free sans
fautes.
4. to replace remplacer / toy jouet, miniature /
cop flic.
5. subtle subtil, discret / mix-up amalgame,
confusion.
6. delay retard, ici temps d’arrêt / vowel voyelle.
7. to pair associer.
8. clue indice, indication, ici explication / overlap chevauchement.
Nous parlons lentement sur
la partie Basic du CD de
conversation, mais ce n'est
pas pour autant que la
prononciation est plus facile !
BT THOMAS JIVANDA
oodbye ‘she sells sea-shells on the seashore’, hello ‘pad kid poured curd
pulled cold’ — quite possibly the hardest tongue twister ever created. Although the
phrase makes little sense, it was able to completely defeat volunteers taking part in a US
speech study, researchers said.
G
Quick!
2. Asked to repeat the phrase 10 times at
speed, many of the participants simply
stopped speaking altogether, according to
lead researcher Dr Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. “If anyone can say this
10 times quickly, they get a prize,” she said.
3. The study was conducted to shed light on
the brain’s speech-planning processes. “When
things go wrong, that can tell you something
about how the typical, error-free operation
should go,” said Dr Shattuck-Hufnagel.
4. Spoken too quickly, certain combinations
of sounds appear to make people lose control
of their mouths, with one sound often replacing another. For example, ‘toy boat’ becomes
‘toy boyt’, and ‘top cop’ becomes ‘cop cop’.
5. Mistakes can also be more subtle the researchers found, with some of the time,
tongue twister mix-ups appearing to be something in between the two sounds.
6. In the ‘top cop’ example, sometimes the
‘t’ and ‘c’ seemed to be spoken almost the
same time so that some of the word was lost,
to become ‘t’kop’. Sometimes there was a delay between the two sounds with space for a
vowel (‘tah-kop’).
7. The scientists studied two categories of
tongue twister, simple lists of paired words,
and whole sentences. Two word tongue
twisters caused more ‘t’kop’ type errors,
while sentences produced more ‘tah-kop’
mistakes that included a short vowel after
the initial consonant.
8. One possible clue to what is happening
may be the regular rhythm of the word lists
compared with the more irregular timing of
the sentences, said Dr Shattuck-Hufnagel.
But there appeared to be some overlap in the
processes used to produce both types of
speech. ●
i
Sounds right! (Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, 1957). (DR)