Children learn to speak through fundamentally different cognitive mechanisms than adults learning a second language

The claim states that children and adults learn to speak through fundamentally different cognitive mechanisms. Papers [0] and [2] directly address this by comparing child and adult language acquisition processes (including child and adult L2), finding qualitative similarities and shared constraints (such as in wanna contraction and inflectional morphology), which argues against the claim of fundamentally different mechanisms. Papers [1], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], and [11] are tangential, discussing topics like bilingual parent-child neural synchrony, autism interventions, shared reading, or specific clinical populations without directly testing the core cognitive mechanism comparison between children and adults. Because the available relevant evidence weighs against the claim, the verdict is REFUTED.