Pronunciation Practice with English tongue-twisters

Try to pronounce the sentence she sells sea shells by the seashore and you will probably understand what a tongue-twister is.  Tongue-twisters are usually used as word games in the English-speaking world, often as a form of entertainment for children.  These phrases are designed to cause the speaker to make mistakes, which are usually just meaningless words.  However, the phrase can also be designed to make the speaker unintentionally say specific—and sometimes even obscene—words.

SEE ALSO: Do you Know how to Pronounce the Most Common Words in English?

How tongue-twisters work

Tongue-twisters are usually phrases that contain a lot of phonetically similar words.  These words are frequently what we call minimal pairs; that is, they are pairs of words that differ only in one sound.

In the example she sells sea shells by the seashore, there are two minimal pairs: she/sea and sells/shells.  In both cases, the words are identical except for the first sound.  What is important about this difference is that it can be useful for determining the differences between similar sounds and practicing pronunciation.
Now, try with the full text:

Challenging, right?

Is it the tongue or our mind that cannot process tongue-twisters?

You might now be asking yourself why tongue twisters are difficult for native speakers of English to pronounce; after all, shells and sells don’t have sounds that are foreign to English, so what would the problem be?

The answer is in the way we process language.  Linguists believe that we don’t process the words in an utterance (anything we say) one by one; instead, the entire string is processed by the brain before we even begin to say the first word.  The errors we make while saying tongue-twisters are often what we call anticipation errors.  These involve mixing up different parts of the utterance.  For example, in the sentence he will going swimming, the –ing ending is used with the verb go because the speaker’s brain has already “seen” it later in the sentence where it is used with the word swimming.  It then got placed on the word go by mistake, in anticipation of the word swimming.

Anticipation errors of this type can happen when two words belong to the same class (part of speech) or when there is some other connection between the words that get mixed up.  For example, go and swim are both verbs, and they both take the –ing ending.  Although word swimming is a noun here, it is derived from a verb and might be perceived as one by the speaker’s mind.

Tongue-twisters usually have their origin not in word classes, but in their phonologically similar words.  Either way, there is a relationship between the words, which confuses the human mind.

More examples

A convenient one for exercising /TH/ – /F/ – /T/ distinction:

Problems with /P/?

Now try handling all these vowels:

A double challenge for learners of English

Now that we have seen why native-speakers of English make mistakes when they say tongue-twisters, you might be wondering how a student of English could benefit from them.  The fact is that they are a double challenge for learners.  This is especially the case when one of the two contrasting sounds (such as the first sounds in she and sea) does not occur in the learner’s native language.  Greek speakers would find sea and she challenging because their language doesn’t make a distinction between /SH/ and /S/.  Combine this with anticipation errors and you will have very interesting results!