Ok now I’m watching a video for toddlers and feeling left lout.

I’ll change my nostrasia presentation to talk about “short o”; everybody should know about this

Was literally listening to a presentation on this earlier in the week about this. Your first language basically cements cements the span of how you perceive phonemes. Arabic for example doesn't different between the /b/ and /p/ phonemes. So they'd actually struggle to differentiate the words bear and pear, while for native speakers they are completely different words and sounds.

Maybe there's a similar phenomenon going on with you 👀