Quote Originally Posted by Fragony View Post
Not entirely true, don't ask me why but toddlers can already hear the difference between languages with international couples, they somehow just know that it are different languages and they learn both seperatily.
I spoke not of the ability to differentiate between languages, but about the ability to acquire language(s). If a child of a sensitive age acquires more than one language, they "are located" in the same brain area. A person past the sensitive age has "to create" a different locus for every new language.

As for an infant's ability to differentiate between languages, I wouldn't make such a bold statement. I would rather say that a child switches from one language to another depending on which of the parents he is talking to. I myself talk to my mother mostly in Ukrainian and to my father mostly in Russian.

If a child is addressed to by one parent, but in different languages he is likely to lump the languages together. I witnessed it when I saw one of my colleague's daughter whom she was trying to teach English from the earliest age possible (that is besides her mother tongue). As a result the child used English word roots in combination with Russian suffixes.