1753: Infants Can Discern any Phoneme Oct 2, 2019

Adults can often seem to struggle more with developing new language skills than very young children, especially when it comes to pronunciation. There are lots of little reasons for adults having difficulty with grammars etc., and certainly one or two myths around it, but one thing that's easily noticeable is that adults tend to struggle with accents, while children don't, not only because they have more adaptable larynxes from not speaking in (usually) one way most of the time, but also they can actually discriminate between sounds better. Infants can hear the difference in every phoneme more or less, and lose that ability after a short time. They continue to use the ones they hear and get positive feedback for pronouncing, and drop the rest. However, babies do not necessarily discriminate between illegal syllables in the given language, but knowledge of sound constraints must logically follow from gaining knowledge of the sounds first.

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