If Holly was trying to teach Sophie call her by name, how could Sophie address her as "mama" ?
If Holly was like talking to Sophie every day, "I am your mama, m-a-m-a" it would be understandable, but that wasn't the case was it?
I'm thinking that since Sophie will have been around other like minded children that would say mama to their own and she would immediately jump to the obvious conclusion that the woman looking after her is therefore her mother.
Scientists know that babies are already slowly learning and understanding words before they speak. Not really a long shot coming to this conclusion.
Or maybe Sophie saw her real life mother and she was telling her to say mama behind the scenes. :P
One of the #1 best Mary Winstead fansites around!
http://miss-winstead.com/
The who now?
Looks like I picked the wrong day to quit shootin' smack...
Sophie was older than 1 years old when her parents died, some babies can talk by that age. Her real mum would have probably been teaching her to say mama, so eventually Sophie figures/remembers that you call the woman who looks after you 'mama' although she might not be the woman who birthed you.
shareno. I think she felt bad about sophie calling her mama because she was not her mom. she was trying to get her to call her by her name. but a lot of the time a baby's first word is mama or dada.
share[deleted]
Because no one here realized that... at all... Because everyone is expecting the child to spontaneously jump on the ability to choose what to call the person who is taking care of them and could, in fact, choose to call them 'mother', 'father', or in this case, 'Messer' or 'Holly', but simply fall under the effects of peer pressure and revert to calling them 'mama' and 'dada' instead. :|
It's not simply just that the words are easy to say, if it were just easy to say that applied to the entire thing they'd go with things like 'baba', 'blah', 'yes', 'no', 'yup', etc. etc., which usually come to be their second or third words to say. Babies pick up on the idea of 'mama' and 'dada', because they realize in their little minds 'Oh crap, lookit that! If I say 'mama' she gives me attention!' same thing with 'dada'. It's not JUST that they're easy to say, it's that they're easy to say and they cause an effect to take place in the environment around them, and that's why they continue to say it so often afterwards. If nothing happened after they said it, it would quickly drop from their mind and they'd move on. It's the same thing with their body language and their actions: if they cry, they get attention. If they gesture nondescriptly at a bottle, they'll be fed. They /know/ something will happen if they do 'this' and that's why they do it. That's kind of what makes us a bit more advanced than other animals, our ability to learn and respond that will eventually evolve into being able to communicate with each other, if it hadn't occurred to you... If the languages evolved simply based on hollow gestures and noises, we'd still be stuck in a primeval time.
But anyway, that's not even what this thread was about in the first place, so I'm not sure why you even brought it up.
In regards to the OP, it's not a long shot to assume that somewhere down the line someone had been telling her 'mama'. Like someone else pointed out, the biological mother, during that first year, was probably saying 'mama' or 'dada' all the time. It's all about assuming what's going on behind the scenes and relating it to real life. How many times do friends go over to friends' houses who are new parents and grovel over the child, pointing at the mother or father and saying 'that's your mama/dada'? And as someone else said, if she saw other kids doing that to the people taking care of them, she'd probably pick it up eventually.
It's not that farfetched an idea to assume she picked up the word somewhere down the line.
[deleted]
The baby calls the grandfather "Dada".
Actually children say ma-ma as a way to practice speaking. It doesnt have to mean anything to them. They say ga-ga and go-go and da-da and all kinds of sound combinations. They are learning how to make sounds.
My daughter says new words all the time that I don't remember teaching her or saying in front of her. Kids are like sponges, they absorb everything.
share