Why is babbling so important? The infant is like a person who has been given a complicated piece of audio equipment bristling with unlabeled knobs and switches but missing the instruction manual. In such situations people resort to what hackers call frobbing—fiddling aimlessly with the controls to see what happens. The infant has been given a set of neural commands that can move the articulators every which way, with wildly varying effects on the sound. By listening to their own babbling, babies in effect write their own instruction manual; they learn how much to move which muscle in which way
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