Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.What is the point of this strange shopping list? According to Steven Weinberg of George Mason University's Speech accent archive, "The paragraph is written in English, and uses common English words, but contains a variety of difficult English sounds and sound sequences. The paragraph contains practically all of the sounds of English." It was composed to study people's accents (fun game based on this here). But it occurred to me that it might be useful to those of us with PD who have trouble enunciating.
If you are like me and have trouble in making any kind of speech clear, this could be the most efficient string of practice phrases ever devised. If you use it in combination with "Speak up for Parkinson's" a free app from the Northwest Parkinson's Foundation, or as part of your LSVT drill, you should have the most difficult sounds covered, no matter what your accent.
