Interesting…

“Mahmah, Pahpah,” “Maamaa, Paapaa,” “Muhmuh, Puhpuh…”

We were taught to enunciate, and be not neglecting– It’s a practice, a meme, a discipline, a science, that pervades all human learning… Accents disappear when clarity is fully and recognizably expressed… Commingling communities commute accents onto styles seemingly affected by personal choice…

Kuhl’s research would seem to belong to that category of brain-function theory that chopped up Einstein’s brain after he was dead, to see if that affected how he’d lived…

That was great! I do agree with that.

You would guess that there is a lot going on before words come to a baby. They do react to certain words appropriately. As fast as new words come out of their mouths when they start using words and putting them together, there had to be a lot of learning beforehand.

I believe they speak what many have come to term the “angelic language”. There is some understanding before birth. It will take a child years to perfect the new language; after which, they leave the “angelic language” behind. It is a process which is developed along with the first steps in its life through growth!

Very cool, made me chuckle.

English is my second language, but a lot of my friends said I don’t really have any accent. I do in some certain words though.

This has been known by students of first and second language acquisition for some time already.

But doesn’t your article title mention babies speaking, not merely recognizing?

Another interesting question is whether there are non-verbal (and willful) sounds that adults make that are shaped by their first or second language.

i want my baby to have a fench accent!! and i want to marry a guy from the U.K .

Interesting for sure. It may be that babies begin to form accents well before they talk, but can anyone explain why my daughter, born to a midwestern mom with a neutral accent (think television anchor, although I’m not one) and a southern dad with a real southern drawl, spoke with a British accent as a baby? At the age of about 8 1/2 months, she said “hot” with the accent when I told her with a neutral accent not to touch the stove because it was “hot”. Now that one has always baffled me, but as she grew, she continued to develop her accent. Normally she speaks with a very neutral accent, but occasionally she’ll lay on the country accent or British accent, except that over the years her British accent has taken on more of an Australian flare. I would say this is like any other study out there. It may be true for the majority, but not everyone falls into the majority. But then again, I have never done anything according to the book either.

Omg! So cool! Totes bubbly!!!!!!!!!!!! My friend thinks that it is bogus!

So… why can people quickly pick up accents in their own language? For instance, it is easy to imitate a Southern accent, or a British accent, etc…

Babies can… TALK? I mean…TALK. Babies…talking… but ACCENTS? This takes it to a whole ‘nother level.

wow that is something i didnt know, you learn something new everyday

Wow, I thought that babies didn’t have an accent.

Impossible. I didn’t even read it and I know!

Cute baby

I read something…somewhere that said scientists detected discernable differences in the cries of babies from different countries, suggesting that they absorbed some kind of ‘accent’ of their native languages while still in the womb.

I lived in China for four years as a baby and moved to the U.S. I don’t hear any asian accents in me. Is it still there?

Yes, very…

Not exactly surprising, is it?

Thats so cool i didn`t know that at all awsome!

but if a French baby was adopted in a Russian language only place, what would they say then and would they have a french accent.

KNOW IT!!!!

very interesting

but i dont have any baby brothers or sisters

only there now children

young children

but i am the oldest lucky for me

what about native speakers to two languages. is it easier for them to learn a third language without accent?

wow

cool – did u know dolphins have accents too?

That is complete and racist nonsense.

note to self: don’t have children until i can speak french, japanese, spanish, german, and russian fluently.

I hadn’t thought about that, but it makes perfect sense.

WOW!

Id rather eat dust then live a life with this baby their talking about

That’s really weird!

how about babies who live in a bilingua home?

This needs to be verified with more researches before we believe this. maybe a few more years, and more experts verification may prove this right.

Crud; so much for ever speaking perfect Spanish.

ow!dat floored me

wow, i learned something new today!

While we’re at it, let’s see whether dogs have accents.

I think we can all agree that it really doesn’t matter. The internet, blimey.

Intresting too second comment

Did they test whether the babies responded better to their own language by using the parents? If so it could just be a response to the sound of a familiar voice as opposed to the tones of their own language..

Does that mean if a baby’s parents frequantly spoke in tones of different accents it would have a hard time learning to speak and start talking a lot later?

Then I’d love to raise my kid for a year in the UK. Get that English drawl in them..haha.

Wow!! Really gave me something to think about this morning! Fantastic discovery!

amazing..but definitely true!..primary language and accent are really hard to abolish and replace..although you already know many foreign languages, still, our own accent will remain..

WOW AWESOME

I would take this with a grain of salt. I have met too many people who have learned a second language and have no accent (although many more, of course, who do).

not suprising to me…My ten year old son speaks with a slight American accent despite the fact we moved here to New Zealand (I don’t have an American accent myself) when he was only 14 months old!

It’s a pity. My little daughter is a victim of accent but we are trying our best, and she is improving tremendously.

With accent being reinforced at such an early age, it shows the difficulty of becoming fluent at a second language

Was any research done in families in which each parent is a native speaker of a different language, for example: mother — Spanish; father — English or reversed?

This is d power of Nature

What about a baby adopted into a family of another nationality?

is impossible for an 8 months baby to speak

and a baby can only learn how to speak the mother’s tongue first before other languages

This all sounds interesting…I’ve rest the rest of the comments and I’ am not surprised at all at some of the negative responses. Its part of the nature’s beast. Personally I believe its all possible, we don’t leave for for possibilities then there can be no vision/or evolution. All these things we never thought possible from years back have come to play…And why is that? Just food for thought.

The Jesus speaks after his birth in Indian ancient poetry “Mahabharta” the Abhimanuy listen the battle field story, the research says all fetus understand easily. The language which speaks by parents should understand easily by the infant.

Same old, same old in Linguistics. Children start to understand and acquire language structures from the very age of 6 months.
They shyly comprehend content word structures, such as some nouns and verbs, and that make up senses that establish a straightforward relation with the objects, or people in the world.
Next, they start to learn function words, those that refer to words that bear more of a grammatical sense.Then, some months later, all of a sudden, they take off and hundreds of words are assimilated into mind. After that, children trudge through structures up to the age of 2 and a half or 3 months, some ones 4, until they reach quite a pitch in terms of pronunciation, meaning and structural usage.
Without a huge suitable, complex sound-processing system, they would not be able to take on a new ability the way they do at early age.

My daughter was adopted from India when she was 14 months old, and she has always had trouble with t’s and d’s, a complex of constants that’s profoundly different in North Indian languages from any European language.

when you work in a kindergarten, you kinda notice that what Dr. Kuhl found out is an absolute fact

UK drawl, huh? There are many different accents in the UK, same as other English-speaking countries have different accents…

This study might be right, but it is probably due to the parents talking to the kid – the kid recognizes the parents’ voices. As the child grows it picks up pronunciation and an accent from its surroundings, not a surprise really.

simply intriging

Pretty cool, I kinda wished I had my Mum’s accent. But I have Papa’s

So not true, I speak 9 languages fluently, no accent. And no I didn’t have multilingual or bilingual parents, and I didn’t travel around the world as a baby. Or at all for that matter. Anyway, all you people who’ve just read this and are discouraged toward learning a new language because of fear that you will have an accent that is impossible to erase, don’t be.

The baby’s reaction was the same as mine! XD

my cousin didnt know how to speak english until she was 6, and now when she talks chinese she has a really reallyreally(and i mean really) strong american accent. actually i have a slight american accent too, though my first language was chinese.

In knew it!!!!!!!

I agree with you, eugene (on September 26, 2012 at 1:11 pm):

“Another interesting question is whether there are non-verbal (and willful) sounds that adults make that are shaped by their first or second language.”

Yes, do adults or even people of younger ages make willful, non-verbal sounds (or verbal sounds not used in speaking, if that makes any sense) that are shaped and/or formed by their first or second language???

I would love to know the answer to that one

And if I can’t find it, I shall conduct a study myself

Who knows. I was raised in a household with four languages flying around (American English, Hebrew, French and Arabic) and by the time I went to school I was fluent in all of them. After starting in an actual school setting, I dropped all but two of those (English and Hebrew), however I can make appropriate sounds for each and many other language I’ve never spoken, mimic lyrics in songs appropriately, understand the general tone of a conversation for languages I spoke as a child and have absolutely no accent in the two languages I speak to this day. Somebody above mentioned something about a child picking up different accents easily; I too do this, and sometimes people become offended and think I’m mocking them before I even realize I’ve latched on to their accent.

That would explain why, after living in a country for a very long time, you start to pronounce words the same way. The pattern in your mind changes after so long and begins to reflect the more often heard accent. Of course, once you go back to your native country you pick up your original accent much faster which is why, when you go back to where ever you currently live, your accent is so much stronger… if that makes any sense at all.

There is a grammar error in this this information report! I don’t know whether to trust it or not.

I completely agree. My native language is Freanch and I live in Australia. My son, when he wasn’t speaking yet use to make different sounds for me or other people like his dad (australian).When he was about 1 and started to speak, I remember a firend telling me- “oh he just spoke french to you!” Actually he wasn’t saying anything in particular, it was just baby talk but to my friend it sounded like french… Now he is 2 and a half, I have been speaking exclusively french to him from the start and he only speaks english, but, when asked he can repeat and prounonced french words perfectly, vowel and all.

Sounds cool! What if a variety of languages were played to them? Like, let’s say you buy several cds with songs on them, each song from a different language. Then you could play the cds all the time for the first three months, and just think how easy it will be for that person to learn those languages! Taking it even a step further- there is a bird that can mimic every sound imaginable. What if a variety of different noises were played to them? Probably, they would be able to make those sounds, too!

I can agree that parents will infleunce accent but I think that an accent can be lost or changed, because if some people move to other areas with strong accents for instance yorkshire to Liver pool or scotland then that person can develope the accent over time without conscius effort

What about accents within regions of the same country (with the same language)? My family lives in south-central Pennsylvania. But, while use dialect and sentence structure from this region, my accent is much more northern, not at all the “Pennsylvania German” accent you’d usually hear. I’ve had several people ask me if I am from northern PA or even New York state.

The only way I can figure is that my mom’s family was from northern PA area, and maybe she passed on the accent? I’d be interested in knowing more information about regional accents.

Oops, forgot to mention that Mom was born & bred here and that Dad’s father was a shunned Amishman, so you’d think that I’d had SOME south-central PA accent.

Still would be an interesting addendum/study, I think.

What about a bilingual family
What do they learn first?

It is true, babies naturally acquire speech sounds by listening to the people around them, particularly their mother and father. This gives each child (with a few exceptions) their accent. It is reinforced by the accent of the general population around them, which is why some children of foreigners don’t have a strong accent from their native language.

However, we are not stuck with the sounds we learned in our first year of life; it is possible to learn how to pronounce sounds from other languages and accents. Even if your ear cannot hear the distinction, you can learn how to shape your mouth to produce sounds the way a native speaker of another language does. Some people have more talent at this than others, and some have simply not learned how to do it. There are books and instructors out there who can train people to speak differently. This is what a speech therapist does, too.

As many actors and multi-lingual people have demonstrated, it is far from impossible to acquire new speech sounds and a new accent.

So I was born in Colorado and moved to South Korea about 2 months later. I stayed there for just a little less than a year. I’m learning Spanish right now, but I can’t get the sounds right. Would it be easier for me to learn Korean, since I was around that language when I was younger?

This article is very interesting, because I think that children hear and learn the words taking into account the pronunciation and sounds that vary from region to region, in fact, when they hear an expression with an accent different from the usual , not immediately understand the meaning of the speech. Moreover this study conducted by Dr. Kuhl is confirmed by the fact that my cousins ​​who have 7 months of age do not understand my uncles, who are Catania and have a dialect entirely different from ours.

thats called early childhood development,which is known to world now.

I was not much surprised. Because I know two sisters and one of them had little dificulty in speech. While her younger sister was pregnant, both of them were living in one dwelling. Sister gave birth to a boy. I am sorry to say that this boy is 30 years old now and has the same problem as his aunty had. So I believe that babies learn language from the womb. I remember one lady told me that she was reading books while she was pregnant, because she wanted the child to learn the language faster. Dr.Kuhl’s finding may be true.
I want to hear from anyone with a solution for this man who has some problem in his speech.

I don’t necessarily agree to Kuhl’s generalisation of baby accents. It could remain valid to a percentage of the world’s population, but unlike a good theory it isn’t flawless and doesn’t apply to some. As a child born to Japanese parents in Australia, my first language was Japanese. However, since I have lived here my entire life, I have been told by people (even Japanese people themselves) that my accent is does not contain even a hint of Japanese. I have friends who are of Chinese, Korean, Italian, etc backgrounds and they are the same But this article certainly was interesting, it makes one think!

My kid grew up in a Cantonese environment but due to various reasons he never learned to speak it. Now he speaks only English. At 18, he tries to learn Cantonese. He is getting better, but his is definitely English accented Cantonese. Hmmm… if the author was right, shouldn’t he already have an ear for Cantonese, given that hespent his first year hearing it? Lets not be too eager to generalize.

I suspect that our brain is simply too complex and plaint for this sort of neat little conclusions from psychologists. Many people learn to speak a second language perfectly starting at as “old” as fifteen or sixteen.

Did anyone notice that on the cover title the author refered to babies as an “it” instead of “they.” I hope that was an oversight.

There are some people who have no problem acquiring proficiency in multiple languages even in later years. how does their brain system function/cope with the different language systems?

I think that human from birth is particularly sensitive to the sound of a voice, the face and gestures of others and especially if the others is a parent that is a point of reference for the newborn. if a parent used her child to a language purely madreligua the child will be taken to acquire that kind of accent and language. Therefore it could be difficult to acquire the correct accent of a foreign language.This is because the parent has used to express qualitatively and quantitatively with their native language.

it is an amazing research, i really loved it i would like to know more about the research and what are the next experiment.

Did you know that you have just combined two of my favourite interests which are words and science? My word that is an interesting concept! I’ve never thought of that. I just assumed that children learnt to talk full stop and then developed an accent later on. Mm, interesting. Sounds genuine to me been as children react to sounds in the womb.

Ok so explain this to me, I have been born and raised in Wales and I have my Dad’s English accent more than a welsh accent and can understand Americans more than British people. My mate is also British but he has an American accent and I’m seriously not making this up and I have a mate from Africa that sounds more British than me. Let’s just say I’m a lot case here.

and what about people who develop accents when they move abroad?

its is a known fact and common sense that we all learn from our parents. its all on how we are were brought up in all areas..speaking,structure,self respect,respect for others,self love and so on..Must I say any more?? It is possible for all babies to learn their native language with accents or not… or whatever that language maybe..it is how we are taught to speak by our parents…Learn by examples…this subject is deep in many ways. I speak my native language, english and learning spanish. good topic.

The phoneme is considered the smallest unit of speech. Certain phonemes are reinforced when we are babies. The range has been noted from as few phonemes of about 11 or 12 in one language up to about 112 in a different language. When we grow and we don’t hear those different phonemes we tend to categorize what we do hear of different, non-native phonemes into what we have already been taught. However, it is not so strict because we can be trained to hear and distinguish different non-native phonemes as adults and sometimes when given ambiguous phonemes they can be categorized correctly. http://ilabs.washington.edu/kuhl/pdf/Iverson_Kuhl_2003.pdf

It should be noted that some still teach “trimming” in which we are born with the full breadth of phonemes available and those which are unused are trimmed out. Dr. Kuhl references Werker & Tees, 1984 in Iverson et al., 2003 as having falsified the trimming hypothesis.

My Russian friend moved with his family to the U.S. when he was 3 or 4 years old. He doesn’t realize he pronounces r just like any ordinary Russian, unlike the lightly-pronounced r of American English. Everything else is good though. Maybe he’ll finally believe me if I show him this article. Haha

Agree with the outcome. We have an American who has called Fiji his home for the last 40-odd years. He speaks Fijian like an islander! But never lost that twang when he rattles off in English!

Baby hears one sound at home, another during test. Baby has never heard “different” sound so doesn’t respond (as much, or at all). Someone actually needed to spend money to figure this out?

And didn’t they do this already, YEARS ago, with sounds that are in Alaskan/Inuit languages that don’t occur elsewhere, that babies/young children either learn in their first couple of years or can NEVER learn???

I’m all for research. I’m NOT for research that duplicates previous research.

I agree largely with the writer of the article, and many of the comments. There are cases I have run into with my work with children; cases where Hispanic babies–only a few months old– adopted into families which speak English, had trouble relaxing their tongues to speak with the southern drawl of their adoptive parents and siblings. More mysterious is the case where one of five siblings has always spoken with a British accent. We (his parents and I) would record him speaking when he was very young, and marvel at the way he spoke. Neither of his parents or any of his progenitors were even of English descent. (The postman wasn’t English either, by the way.)

So….if I want my kid to speak with a British accent? Even though I am not British by any means. I should just speak to it with a British accent for it’s first year? Good to know. That was very interesting! =]

It may seem interesting, but if you think about it, it is obvious. Babies recognize best what they have been exposed. Speaking is not a cause, but only a long-term result of that exposure. We have to recognize our language and be able to differentiate it from other languages before we can speak it.

“The sounds of our first language are so primary it is formidable—if not impossible—to learn some sounds of foreign languages.”

There’s enough research out there that has shown that it’s never impossible to learn to recognize or make the sounds of a non-native language.

But there are some poeple who speak english and are good at speaking other languages…so how is it possible that babies would have an accent if some people didn’t know any other language(s).And there are also some poeple who travel around the world with their babies and learn different languages.doesn’t that mean that as the babies grow up they will have different accents?
(age:9yrs)

But what if an infant is exposed to multiple languages in their first year of life? Say their father is French and their mother is English and both languages are spoken an equal amount around the baby. Would it just be a toss up of which one sticks, or would the infant develop a mixture of both?

What about people who grow up in multi-lingual families? I, for example have a Danish mother, German father, live in Poland all my life and I go to an international school? I speak Danish, German, English, Polish and i’m learning French and it all comes easily to me…I don’t know what to think

Wow! I didn’t know that! BTW, in the list of English, Swedish, Japanese and Russian, it says English, Sweden, Japanese andRussian.

When my son was 3 months old, I switched from speaking Greek (my mother language), to English, in order to make him bilingual. It was obvious from his facial expression that he immediately recognized that I was making different sounds than before. For a few days, he seemed quite puzzled, and then he got used to it.

this would explain why peole don’t understand me very well. My primary language was spanish but I learned English first. My family is hispanic.

”Kuhl observed that the infants were more responsive to the sounds of their own language than to the sounds of other foreign languages—even before they were able to speak themselves.”
….

yeah… and apparently they also learn to crawl before they walk too….

Although it’s well recognized empirically that if a child moves to a new country before the age of about 14, they will be able to eventually speak the new language without any accent.
Conversely those arriving later will never speak the new language without an accent no matter how long they live in the new country, since that’s apparently when speech patterns get finally fixed in the brain.

very intresting……:)

@ Clarissa Thomas
Nothing wrong with having an Aussie accent cobber.

I speak English with a perfect American accent. I don’t think I was spoken to in any English at less than one year of age!

This could be true. When I was a small child I mostly had the television for a babysitter. People say I sound like a cross between Walter Cronkite and Daffy Duck.

Me & Daniela so agree with this article LMAOOOO

This is very interesting. My boyfriend moved to the states from Poland just before he turned twelve. He had never spoken, let alone heard a word of English in his life. Of course have to adjust, he learned English and it’s nearly impossible to tell he ever spoke any language aside from English. The thing I find most interesting is around native English speakers, his English is flawless. But around his family and other Native Polish speakers, if they have accents and are speaking English, he picks up the accent instantly. I agree that it’s more of a response to an infants parents than anything. Although it is difficult to unlearn an accent it is quite possible.

Although I grew up in America German was my first language as a baby listening to my German Mom married to a GI who spoke Southern English but wasn’t around a lot when I was a baby, I can speak both languages now but have a better ear for German pronunciation then my siblings who are younger, born in the US and were exposed to older siblings and more of my dad’s speech. I think another interesting thing is what vowel sounds people use when hemming and hawing between words, it seems different from language to language –for example in English it might be “uh-umm” and it French it’s ” er uhr” in German maybe “ahh” and how some languages people speak very high sopranoish tones and in others in lower alto tones whether male or female.

This is weird. I don’t really believe it. sorry

interesting…………..very interesting

Having 1 Child Makes You A Parent But Having 2 Makes You A Refree.

Is there any research that looks at parents with different accents raising a child?

Accent should have nothing to do with it. The big issue is whether or not the speakers (whether instructors or peers or parents or … whomever) observe proper rules of English grammar and word selection/vocabulary. I don’t mind struggling to understand someone’s pronunciation, but when the basic sentence doesn’t make any sense, I am not happy at all. My experience has shown that, the stronger the accent, the worse the grammar and the worse the word selection. I work closely with a person of Polish descent who considers himself to be linguistically without equal – which is a complete joke! Although I know he is highly intelligent, he’s not taken the time to learn English grammar. He does know the words – but has no clue how to put them together. Not only is he incapable of orally communicating properly, he likewise pens some of the worst nonsense I’ve ever encountered in emails and other written communications. But, if he can’t force his mouth and tongue around the words, that’s not something he can probably fix. And sometimes, with some people, it can be quite charming and entertaining, in fact. But he – and everyone else who is challenged to learn another language – CAN and MUST learn and practice proper grammar and proper vocabulary if they’re going to teach or model the English language. As an aside, Arizona pulls some real doozies, don’t they? I’m glad I don’t live in that constitutionally-challenged state.

probably because the language and accent was closest to their parents whom they probably recognize therefore react to and relate to more so than the other languages

Actually, babies even begin crying with an accent when just a few days old.

Disagree! because we can know accent if we grew up in the country where we live .. my friend is a Filipino but she has British accent, It is just by mere listening because our brain can cope up easily more so if we are in the process of growing up, It is unformidable

wow! i never knew that i wish i could go back in time and understand what i say that would be soooooo! nice.

This is so stupid! i do NOT agree. this is adisgrace to all scienc. Just kidding! i have read thestudy. It is beyond brilliant

thats why I don’t understand chinese at all!, and i thought it was just like learning english.
also thats really cool because it’s like learning a language your entire life and not even knowing that you have been learning languages even before you could talk!

I think he right I’m not sure really well yeah. I think he’s right because some babies when their able to say they’re first word they might have an accent sometimes they don’t.

Why is the title almost completely unrelated to the content of the article? Why is only 15 year-old research mentioned, and nothing said about more recent work? Why all these questions?

Article Title: “Do babies speak with an accent?”

1st Sentence of the Article: “We all know that infants don’t actually speak with an accent because they don’t really speak at all.”

So change the title of the article. You’re either being purposefully misleading or have a disturbingly low level of intelligence. Or both.

Wow that is a good topic for a school report.:)

I have a theory that would like you to test if that is possible. i think that there are at least 5 languages that if learned at an early age will allow you to pronuonce any language perfectly throught your life. do you think this is quite far fetched? or is there truth here?

I’ve always wondered whether a child has an inbred accent at Birth, before it even learns how to speak. If a Baby of any ethnic background is immediately removed from it’s Parents and given to others of a different kind, MY question has always been, will (for example) a Chinese baby adopted at Birth by a German couple, speak German WITH a Chinese accent?

I took it one step further, and wondered whether a Leopard – abandoned by its Mother – was adopted by some Lions and grew up as a Leopard with a Lion’s way of communication.

Hmmmmmm?

thats cute i do think babbies do have some sort of accent

This confirms what I noticed last summer when I traveled to Italy. I’m absolutely certain that when I heard babies crying, their cry was different than the American babies I’ve heard. The cry of the Italian babies was inflected up and down, in the same manner people inflect their vowels when trying to imitate an Italian accent. It’s something I distinctly noticed and remarked to my friends at the time.

If hearing their own language makes them respond to the sounds of their language, I wonder what would happen if they were exposed to many languages.

i think thats true

awesome.

Do babies speak with an accent?
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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 whose parents spoke different languages, including English, Swedish, Japanese andRussian. Different languages are made of different types of sounds. Native English speakers have difficulty pronouncing the subtle vowel differentiations of French, while native Japanese speakers have trouble differentiating the l and r sounds of English. Because of these variations, Kuhl could test if a child of Russian-speaking families responded particularly to the sounds of the Russian language, or if their reaction to speech did not vary from language to language.
In her experiments, Kuhl observed that the infants were more responsive to the sounds of their own language than to the sounds of other foreign languages—even before they were able to speak themselves. She discovered that babies as young as one year acquire the specific accented sounds of their parents and that the first year of listening makes a lasting impact on the way we speak for our entire lives. As she told Smithsonian magazine, “Our research shows that a kernel of that pattern of speaking begins to form in the brain well before actual production of speech. And by the time the baby’s first words do come, those distinctive characteristics are solidly in place.”
(What exactly is an accent? Find out here.)
This also helps explain why it is difficult for second-language learners to abolish their accents. The sounds of our first language are so primary it is formidable—if not impossible—to learn some sounds of foreign languages.
What do you think of Kuhl’s research? Do you have other questions about language acquisition?

Read more at http://hotword.dictionary.com/baby-accents/comment-page-7/#f5E8QRuXH0C8AOZF.99

thats awesome

144 comments

I’m Cool And I Know It

I spoke 100 languages when I was a child (5 Years Old) I’m jk

Hi World

I wish I had an accent. They sound so kool. ☺ ♫

It is cool…

Scientists should do a study in uteros, as it seems according to this study babies respond more favorably to language of their family. Possibly if you exposed pre birth languages in uteros you may make interesting discoveries. Likely it will not be conducted because of the controversy of when a baby’s life is worth saving in the womb or out of the womb.

Babies are very intellegent beings!!! They pick up things very fast…So for them to have an accent is so possible. Never underestimate a baby, think twice cause they know things than you think they dont!! #I have lots of different accents so awesome…

O.M.G. DEFINITELY MY HOMESCREEN

I always wondered how a person who lived in a foreign country for the first three years of their life before moving to the US could still retain their accent. Now I know!

Very interesting the way curiosity can lead us to new discoverys.

Hmmm… My mother was born up North and my father down south. After 1 or 2 years of living with him in Arkansas, she had developed a Southern accent. Now she does not have one. Are accents so fickle as to change within a matter of a year or more. I can impersonate an english accent just by watching youtube videos on a certain channel where the commentators are english. Still, I suppose that those are just variations of a language. An American who’s parents came from Russia would still have a Russian accent, no matter how slight.

Actually the conclusion is false

If you take a 2-3 yr old Russian baby and raise him in America with american parents, the baby will grow up speaking English with no accent just like any other american kids – even kids as old as 5 yr old can be “transplanted” to another country and learn to speak “just like the natives”

it’s only after you reach a certain age, that you have trouble learning to speak a second/third language without an accent.

The problem is that the voicebox forms in those months, as the baby imitates what s/he hears (before speaking actual words). If s/he doesn’t speak those vowels then, s/he will never do so perfectly.

well, im 16 years of age and iv’e spoken engish all my life with the american accent but i stayed in new york for a while -(1 year)- and easely picked up their accent with no problem. but i cam back to texas and regained my normal accent fyi(people in texas do not have a brisk country accent im goth and speak pure english i dont say -yall,winder,yesh..) not that im pointing anyone out but no stereotypes please

Yes a cute baby acint i have a kid of my own

COPYTALK SHOUT OUT BABIES GOT ACCENTS YO

HI JAKE, what do you think about baby accents

Babies are awful and I hope I never have one.

god bless that baby so cute

COPYTALK WASSUPP BABIES ARE TERRIBLE AND THEY DON’T HAVE AN ACCENT!

makes absolutely no sense

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