tonic accent

What makes certain accents sexy and others harsh? “The RINE in SPINE fawls MINELY on tha PLINE!” In the song “The Rain in Spain” from the musical My Fair Lady, phonetics professor Henry Higgins (‘enry ‘iggins) pleads with Eliza Doolittle to say “Ay not I, O not Ow.” By the end of the song Eliza’s “AY-ing” and “O-ing” and pronouncing all her H’s. The guttersnipe is …

We all know that infants don’t actually speak with an accent because they don’t really speak at all. But for a long time scientists presumed that infants’ brains could not process sounds at all. Professor Patricia Kuhl, the director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning at the University of Washington, wanted to test this notion. Kuhl studied infants between six and eight months …