According to B.F. Skinner, cooing and babbling are inborn behaviors; only those sounds that are consistent with a child's parents' native language remain because of ____.

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Skinner believed that behaviors, including language development, are shaped through reinforcement and can disappear through a lack of reinforcement, a process known as extinction. Shaping refers to the reinforcement of behaviors that are successively closer to the desired behavior. In the context of language development, sounds that are reinforced (because they are consistent with the parents' language) are retained, while those that are not reinforced undergo extinction.