Laura Soames (Brighton, 1840–1895) was a British phonetician, best known for her work applying phonetic principles to the teaching of the pronunciation of English and of foreign languages.
Later he edited and added to a manuscript she was working on at the time of her death which combined revisions of the Introduction with aspects of The Child’s Key to Reading (Soames 1894), the book which had established her as a force in language education.
[5] Soames is also known for her 1889 proposal, which she credited to Curwen, that principal accents (stresses) are isochronous in English, that is, they appear at equal time intervals.
The well-known phonetician Henry Sweet quickly disagreed (1889, Le maître phonétique), and the argument continues to the present day.
[2][6] Soames left a bequest to the University of London to fund the Laura Soames Prize, which was intended to promote the study of phonetics by awarding an annual prize in the Department of Phonetics at University College for the most distinguished piece of research work dealing with the phonetic structure of a living language.