Tickling your baby might be more than just good fun – it could actually help him or her learn to speak, according to a new study.

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A team of researchers, based at Purdue University in the US state of Indiana, say they've found that tickling your child while talking to them actually helps him or her identify words.

That's because, they say, a baby’s sense of touch is so closely linked to language development.

"We found that infants treat touches as if they are related to what they hear and thus these touches could have an impact on their word learning," says study leader Amanda Seidl, an associate professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at Purdue.

"We think of touch as conveying affection but our research shows that infants can relate touches to their incoming speech signal. Until now, the impact of touch on language learning has not been explored."

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During the study, 48 English-learning 4-month-olds were tested in 2 groups as they sat on their parent's lap, facing an experimenter and listened to a pre-recorded stream of nonsense words.

In the 1st group but not in the 2nd group, every time the word ‘dobita’ came up in the stream of nonsense words, the experimenter touched the baby’s knee. And afterwards, in a follow-up language preference study, it was clear that almost all of the babies had pulled ‘dobita’ out of the continuous stream of speech.

So, get tickling everyone!

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