What is a Tongue Twister?
A tongue twister is a series of words or a longer piece, like a poem, constructed to be very difficult to pronounce properly. Tongue twisters are used to create humor by challenging someone to repeat them very fast and listening to the funny results, as well as by public speakers and speech language students to increase verbal agility. Tongue twisters are also useful in understanding how we process language: they have been used in scientific research to substantiate the claim that silent reading involves articulation. It turns out that there are certain sound sequences that are difficult to alternate because of the changing positions in the mouth and/or the aural feedback of the sound similarities, and tongue twisters focus on these. Sometimes the visual appearance of the words is an added factor.
