Talk at eye level
Babies learn how to talk by closely watching how we move our lips and at the same time listen to the words or sounds associated with the lip movement. For this reason alone, we should talk to babies at their eye level from about 12 to 18 inches from their face. By being near to them, they can easily observe how we form words.
In one experiment, 10 to 16 weeks old babies watched tapes of a woman speaking. Most of the time the voice of the woman is in sync with the movements of her lips. However, at other times, the sound is deliberately delayed by 400 milliseconds (almost half a second) with the lip movement. The babies looked away from the video tape when the sound and the lip movement are out of sync. Who would have thought that babies as young as 16 weeks could detect such a subtle difference?
The lesson that I got from this clever experiment is to advise parents to talk in front of their baby and toddlers at their eye level. This small strategic move could make a big difference in their learning words faster.