By the time infants are about 1 year old, they lose their universal phoneme discrimination ability. They can only discriminate among those phonemes that are used in the language or languages in their environments.

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Early on, babies can discriminate among the sounds of all human languages, even those that do not occur in the languages used in their environments. For example, they can differentiate between the "s" in vision and the "sh" in dishes.

Infant Universal Phoneme Discrimination

Spielman, R. M., Jenkins, W. J., & Lovett, M. D. (2020, April 22). Psychology (2nd ed.). OpenStax. https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/1-introduction

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