Infants lose their abilities to discriminate among foreign phonemes as they are able to make increasingly fine discriminations between the phonemes in their mother tongue.

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This is known as the "loss of phonemic contrast" and is a natural part of language acquisition. Infants' brains become tuned to the specific phonemes of the language(s) they are exposed to, making it harder for them to distinguish between foreign phonemes later on.

Infants Lose Their Abilities to Discriminate Among Foreign Phonemes as They