This happened when my son was 1.5 years old. He would play with my nephew who is the same age.
One of their favorite game is to act like someone who is trying to park a car and moving backward. The cars here make a warning sound ( a repeating sound like a mild ambulance alarm) on reverse-gear.
The kids used to reproduce the sound of this alarm. But surprisingly the sound they made was vastly different from the original sound; it only had some rhythmic similarity with the original sound.
One thing was absolute. The sound they made were as if someone read a sequence of alphabets from Tamil - their mother tongue. I was curious because they are yet to be introduced into the alphabets.
I would guess the kids have unknowingly modeled the sounds to a sequence of phonemes in their native language and when they reproduced the sound, they did not reproduce the sound but they reproduced the identified phonemes.
The difference is vast because each phoneme in a language has some freedom and the kids chose the sound that is easy to reproduce but still falls into the same phoneme of the native language.
Is my understanding right?
