Cantonese Tongue Twister Corpus

Participants:	100 healthy participants (aged 18–25)
Type of Study:	Read-aloud Tasks
Location:	Hong Kong
Media type:	audio
DOI:	N/A

Citation information

Wong, M. N., Chan, Y., Ng, M. L., & Zhu, F. F. (2019). Effects of transcranial direct current stimulation over the Broca’s area on tongue twister production. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 21(2), 182–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2017.1417480

Project Description

This study aims to examine the modulation effect of High-Definition transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (HD-tDCS) on two brain locations — Broca’s area and the inferior parietal cortex. These two regions play critical roles in the function of sensorimotor control. By delivering a weak direct current through the scalp and skull to a specific cortical region using 4×1 HD-tDCS montage, HD-tDCS can increase or decrease the cortical excitation for a short-term period. Therefore, the stimulation of these two regions is expected to demonstrate the effect of HD-tDCS on speech motor learning efficiency in healthy adults.

A total of 100 healthy participants (aged 18–25) were recruited for the study. All recruited participants were randomly assigned to one of the following five groups: (1) anodal HD-tDCS on Broca’s area, (2) anodal HD-tDCS on the inferior parietal cortex, (3) cathodal HD-tDCS on Broca’s area, (4) cathodal HD-tDCS on the inferior parietal cortex, and (5) sham HD-tDCS. The grouping and type of HD-tDCS applied was blinded to both the clinician and the participant.

For groups (1)–(4), 20 minutes of full current stimulation were applied to participants’ head. For group (5), a full current was only delivered for 30 seconds at the beginning and end of the stimulation to mimic real stimulation sensations, but no active stimulation was delivered in the remaining duration.

Participants were asked to perform a read-aloud task at 3 different time points — (A) before tDCS, (B) during tDCS, (C) 4 hours after tDCS. Parts (A)–(B) were conducted at one sitting, which took around 1 hour. A break of 4 hours was given before conducting part (C), which took about 15 minutes.

The task consisted of 20 target tongue twisters and 10 filler tongue twisters. The 20 targeted tongue twisters included 10 contextualized and 10 de-contextualized forms converted from the contextualized TT by changing initial consonants. There are 20 non-contextualized TTs in total, but the software will randomly pick 10 from the 20. The stimulation paradigm is 2.0 mA intensity × 20 minutes.

Information on participant characteristics is in this spreadsheet.
The sentence list is in this spreadsheet.
Jyutping versions of the sentences is in this table.

This dataset is currently under embargo.