You know, I find a lot (not all) of these silly studies a waste of time and money, but for some reason I found this one full of win. Babies, crying, accents is just brilliant. Now I want to hear recorded baby cries from several different countries and hold a web game show called "name that baby's country".
Prosody is an important part of language, and any study which gives insight into how language acquisition works is valuable and could lead to many practical technologies. Although the headlines (as usual) appear to be going well beyond what conclusions were justified by the study.
Here's a more skeptical in depth perspective from Liberman who's an expert on phonetics
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You know, I find a lot (not all) of these silly studies a waste of time and money, but for some reason I found this one full of win. Babies, crying, accents is just brilliant. Now I want to hear recorded baby cries from several different countries and hold a web game show called "name that baby's country".
Prosody is an important part of language, and any study which gives insight into how language acquisition works is valuable and could lead to many practical technologies. Although the headlines (as usual) appear to be going well beyond what conclusions were justified by the study.
Here's a more skeptical in depth perspective from Liberman who's an expert on phonetics
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1869