An infant is exposed to two languages with differing phonotactic constraints. Why does the infant still exhibit canonical babbling before diverging to language-specific phoneme use?

💡 Explanation

Infants initially produce canonical babbling due to motor constraints that favor easier-to-articulate sounds, because motor development precedes the fine-grained phonetic discrimination necessary for language-specific phoneme use; therefore, universal sounds are produced, rather than immediate specialization based on language-specific input.

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