At what age can infants typically discriminate vowels in their native language?

Infants typically develop the ability to discriminate vowels in their native language by around 6 months of age. At this developmental stage, they have begun to process acoustic and phonetic features of speech sounds, allowing them to differentiate between various vowel sounds they hear in their environment. This milestone reflects the child's growing auditory discrimination skills, which are crucial for language acquisition.

By around 4 months, infants may begin to recognize some aspects of speech, but their ability to specifically discriminate between different vowel sounds has not fully developed. The ability to differentiate vowels improves significantly by 6 months, making this age the correct answer for when this skill is typically observed.

As infants continue to grow, particularly by 9 months, their abilities expand further, allowing them to respond to more complex aspects of speech, such as consonants and syllable structures, but the primary ability to discriminate vowels is established much earlier. By 11-12 months, they are refining their discrimination skills, becoming more attuned to the nuances of their native language, but vowel discrimination is a foundational skill that appears around the 6-month mark.