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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.