Chapter One

Birth to Three Months

The newborn baby arrives totally helpless and dependent, but nonetheless amazingly well equipped in a number of ways to interact with the adults around him. He shows an emotional inclination toward people from the very start of life and soon engages them in the communication process.

He recognizes his mother’s and father’s voices on his very first day,1 from how they sounded while he was in the womb. He also will respond to a television or radio show that has been frequently played in his vicinity!2 (He has in fact been hearing for the past two months, as the auditory system is functional from the seventh month of pregnancy.) The newborn’s hearing is not yet as sensitive as that of adults;3 he shows a reflex turning toward low quiet sounds, which will later be lost.

Within days, he can distinguish recordings of his own cries from those of other babies and can discriminate between the sound of a real baby crying and a computer simulation, crying harder in response to the former. At this stage too, he shows a preference for speech that is high-pitched and very tuneful, with lots of rises and falls.4, 5 By the age of one month, he is showing interest in listening to a wide range of sounds and will “fixate” on one sound for some time. An extraordinary feature at this stage is that by the age of four weeks, he can distinguish between phonemes, which are the smallest units in the language to signal meaning. This means, for example, that he knows there are two different sounds when he hears the words “pat” and “bat” spoken, although the difference is only a tiny one.6 By two months, babies can eve