Can you say the world's trickiest tongue twister?

DOCTORS have devised the trickiest tongue twister in the English language. Can you say the whole thing without losing control of your mouth? Bet you can't.

Err, tongue tied.

PAD kid poured curd pulled cold.

Wait ... what?

It doesn't make sense, but this list of words is anything but random.

It's scientifically devised to truly stump you. In the mouth.

Psychologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked volunteers to say the sentence 10 times in a row, at a fast lick.

No-one could. In fact, most appeared to lose control of their mouths as they tried to say it.

The tongue twister study, presented at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Francisco, 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," Dr Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel told the Daily Mail.

She said certain combinations of sounds, said at a fast pace, can make people lose control of their speech.

For example, "toy boat" becomes "toy boyt", and "top cop" becomes "cop cop".

In most cases, the sounds don't get mixed up with each other, but form a hybrid sound somewhere in between.

The MIT team, working with colleagues in Germany, has already collected data from the next stage of the research - placing tiny transducers on volunteers' tongues to measure their articulation.

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