"Pad kid poured curd pulled cold” – Psychologists reveal the world's most frustrating tongue twister

December 9, 2013

To shed light on the brain’s speech-planning processes, a tongue twister study conducted by researchers at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Francisco.

Psychologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked the volunteers to say the sentence 10 times in a row, at a fast lick.
The volunteers recorded different combinations of words (like “the top cop saw a cop top”) but the most challenging one was the phrase ‘Pad kid poured curd pulled cold’, while saying it, many of them clammed up and stopped talking altogether.
The jumble of words “Pad kid poured curd pulled cold” sound nonsensical but it is the most tricky tongue twister ever, leaving tongue-tangling classics like “Peter piper and his peck of pickled pepper” and “She sells seashells by the seashore” in the dust.

Why scientists study tongue twisters?

Scientists study speech errors such as tongue twisters to understand how the brain processes and plans speech.
They study the two categories of tongue twisters: i) Simple lists of paired words. ii) Whole sentences.

This operation would assist in understanding that when things go wrong, how a typical, error-free operation would go and when certain combinations of sounds are spoken too quickly, people seem to lose control of their mouths.

« Previous Post Next Post »