Just two or three months following birth, the new born baby gets accustomed to your voice pattern and gestures, and the way you show your love to him, touch him or cuddle him. This is the stage when he starts identifying you through these gestures. His sense of touch and hearing starts developing. Your every tender touch, your every affectionate kiss fills him with reassurance and infuses confidence in him. He also develops a sense of self-importance and worthiness of attention when his small cry fetches you running with showers of kisses and hugs.
Sometimes it so happens that in spite of all your affectionate and careful responses to meet his needs, the child continues to cry and you are at a loss to understand the problem. Be assured his cries are not cause for worry. Quite possibly the child has acquired a new energy and his cries are a mere communication or an effort to release that energy – an occasion to be happy rather than sad. You rock or move the baby around giving him a sense of movement or motion.
With the passage of another three months he learns to identify vocal sounds and their intonation. You gave him his name soon after his birth and have been addressing him by that name. By the time he is six months old, he identifies himself with that name and responds accordingly.
Formerly, at the age of two or three months his responses to your affectionate calls would not attract his visual attention. In fact they would have been in the form of movements of his limbs, while he kept looking in a different direction. Now he responds to the call of his name by looking in your direction. He also visibly reacts to your show of anger or love by making appropriate movements.
By the time he is nine months old, he starts uttering human sounds, incomplete syllables, and fragmented but meaningful words. He starts acquiring linguistic awareness and skills of speech. He cannot only understand some words and sentences, but his vocal organs can make out some understandable word sounds.