During bath time or other daily routines, imitate your baby's coos and babbles. Have back-and-forth 'conversation' using your baby's sounds as prompts.
Research has found that an infant’s ability to imitate is not innate but is learnt within the first few months of the infant's life. Adults who play with, imitate, and talk to infants during daily routines help facilitate imitation skills and learning opportunities that build their cognitive, motor and language abilities.
Children will follow a pattern of imitation when their movements are imitated first. Imitating a child’s sounds and gestures during daily routines provides early experience in mapping the similarities between a baby’s self and others, and provides models for the baby to imitate. Meltzoff A. N. (2007). The 'like me' framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent. Acta Psychologica, 124(1), 26–43. Saby, J.N., Meltzoff, A.N., Marshall, P.J. (2013) Infants’ Somatotopic Neural Responses to Seeing Human Actions: I’ve Got You under My Skin. PLoS ONE 8(10): e77905. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077905
See more at CD-PLY-C01 and CD-PLY-C02.