Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score 1)

I saw her at a conference recently. She studied the ability to distinguish phonemes. For example, in Japanese, the /r/ and /l/ sounds are the same and therefore, it's hard for a Japanese-only native speaker to hear the difference between these two sounds. The same happens when American students try to learn Chinese; all these phonemes sound the same. She concluded that there is a learning phase, before 8 month old or so, when infants learn to distinguish sounds in a universal way, but between 8 and 11 month old, they start to specialize and after that, it becomes much harder for them to learn to differentiate two sounds that are merged in their native language.