In the last few decades, developmental (psycho)linguists have demonstrated that perceiving talking faces audio-visually is important for early language acquisition. Using mostly well-controlled and screen-based laboratory approaches, this line of research has shown that paying attention to talking faces is likely to be one of the powerful strategies infants use to learn their native(s) language(s). In this review, we combine the evidence from these screen-based studies with another line of research that has studied how infants learn novel words and deploy their attention during naturalistic play. In our view, this is an important step to develop an integrated account on infants’ effective use of talkers’ faces during early language learning. We then identify three factors that have been understudied so far, despite the fact that they are likely to have an important impact on how infants deploy their attention (or not) towards talking faces: social contingency, speaker characteristics and task- dependencies. Last, we propose ideas to address these issues in future research, with the aim to reduce the existing gap between current experimental studies and how infants effectively use and rely upon talking faces in their real-life language environment.