Tongue twisters to evaluate speech disorders
Reviewed by Gauri Mankekar

This interesting study compared errors in tongue twisters produced by adult patients with dysarthria with those produced by age-matched healthy controls. Audio recordings of all patients while they were vocalising tongue twisters were studied. The authors marked one word prominently in each tongue twister. Both groups had fewer errors when vocalising words with prosodic prominence. Patients with dysarthria spoke more slowly than the healthy controls and also had more errors during vocalisation. This study provided the authors with evidence that focus on prosody decreases the likelihood of a dysarthric speaker making errors with that word again. The authors were also able to conclusively demonstrate the possibility of using tongue twisters to evaluate speech disorders in patients with dysarthria.

Inducing speech errors in dysarthria using tongue twisters.
Kember H, Connaghan K, Patel R.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION DISORDERS
2017;52(4):469-78.