A woman at prenatal class mentioned Dunstan Baby Language, and I thought it sounded interesting and made sense, but I only looked into some more details this morning. A woman in Australia named Priscilla Dunstan has a photographic memory for sound, and when she had her son, learned to interpret his cries. She was featured on Oprah recently, and a brief summary is here. The sounds a newborn makes are based on reflexes, and since crying is the newborn's way of communicating, it only makes sense that their specific cries have specific meanings. This woman was simply able to put words to the cries. For example, the "hungry" cry sounds like "neh" and is based on the sucking reflex, where the baby has his/her tongue at the roof of the mouth, making the "n" sound. The sounds are as follows:
"neh" - hunger
"eh" - needs to burp (air in chest)
"owh" - sleepy
"heh" discomfort
"eair" gas pain, crampy (lower belly)
So far, so good as far as accuracy - you can, of course, buy her DVD which has lots more information from dunstanbaby.com
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