Why does an infant learning English exhibit reduced phonetic drift towards a non-native sound contrast after canonical babbling?

💡 Explanation

Perceptual attunement, a form of statistical learning, occurs because infants categorize sounds based on distributional properties in their linguistic environment. Therefore, non-native contrasts become less salient as the infant's perceptual space is warped, rather than motor inhibition or lack of cognitive resource allocation being the primary driver.

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