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CutiePie2000: all people are born with the ability to make the sounds of all languages and can do so until about age 15, when the upper palate hardens. Then it's next to impossible to pick up a foreign accent.
Sometimes what a parent wants to eliminate with speech therapy depends on the parent's language. One of my Belgian ESOL students told me that when her son was little, she paid a lot to have a speech therapist get rid of his "th" lisp because their language has no "th", just a "d". Then they moved to America when he was a teenager and he couldn't make a "th" in English!
Some accents are harder to eliminate than others....Vietnamese people, for instance, have a hard time toning down the nasality of their language and some Asians really do have a hard time with substituting "l" for "r".
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