2.2. Giving the message a meaning.

We as human beings are very dependent of communication with each other to ask or demand things that could be useful for us. When parents have a baby, even more when they're firstling, it's very difficult to distinguish what the baby needs, now that his ability to communicate will not develop until he is one year old. There could be confusing situations that make parents go desperate and they don't have more options than to ask for help to people who had passed through this similar situation, which is more usual that the firstling mother ask for advice to her own mother about how to recognize her baby's sounds.

But, how do experienced mothers know what the sounds a baby makes to communicate mean? It is, of course, by the experience, and the time the mother spends with her child to develop their 'own language'. According to Steven Gillis, Florien Koopmans-van Binum and Jeannette van der Stelt, on the essay 'The prelinguistic stage', say: "During the first year mother and infant develop their ability to communicate with each other by means of gestures and sounds, and consequently the interpreting role of the mother decreases. The child can now make clear what he means and he marks his communicative efforts by gazing at his mother while gesturing and making noises and by waiting for the effect of his efforts" (1988).

The baby learns sounds that, with time, he starts giving them a meaning to refer to the things he sees around him, for example, the baby wants to take the bottle that is over the T.V. furniture but he can't reach it, so he asks to his mother for help, making a sound like "ta-ta" and pointing at the object until she understands and gives it to him. Until that moment, the child knows he can refer to the bottle as "ta-ta" and his mother will understand, and we can say that they create a new mother-son language for a short period of time until the infant develops his way of speaking and can communicate clearer.