ABSTRACT
The recognition that babies can be readers is fairly recent in Brazil and Mexico. For a long time, it was believed that the ability to understand complex relationships between sounds and graphic symbols was almost indispensable for reading. From this perspective, the story of the reader would start once she/he became proficient in understanding the basic rules of this representational system. Reading is a social practice, however, a practice embedded in a cultural process that has been historically constructed, and more recently it has been understood that the story of the reader begins as soon as the child arrives into the world as a listening participant (cf. Imhof, 2013). Hence, to read is to develop the ability to symbolize, to construct meaning from written texts, to resort to the symbolic tools created by humankind, to appropriate the knowledge and practices that have been developed and transmitted by previous generations, and to create new forms to interact with what has been written. Understood as such, the act of reading begins as soon as the baby arrives into the world, immersed already in a symbolic universe.
