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Tickling your baby could actually help them learn to speak, researchers have found.

They say that parents who tickle their child while talking to them actually helps them identify words in the continuous stream of speech.

The Purdue team say a baby's sense of touch is far more closely linked to their language development than previously thought.

Researchers say that parents who tickle their child while talking actually help them identify words in the continuous stream of speech, and could help them learn to speak more quickly.

The new research from Purdue University shows that a caregiver's touch could help babies to find words in the continuous stream of speech.

'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,' said Amanda Seidl, an associate professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at Purdue, who led the study.

'We think of touch as conveying affection, but our recent research shows that infants can relate touches to their incoming speech signal.

'Others have looked at the role of touch with respect to babies forming an attachment and physical development.

'But until now the impact of touch on language learning has not been explored.'

Learning words presents a challenge for infants since most of the words they hear are presented in a continuous stream of speech, rather than isolated words, by their caregivers.

Parents may pause before saying an infant's name, but they almost never do so for other words.

This research explored whether touches could help infants to find where words begin and end in the continuous stream of speech.

'They need to find words before they can attach real meaning to their words,' Seidl said.

'Because names of body parts are often the first words that babies learn and touching is often involved when caregivers talk about body parts, we speculated that touch could act as a cue to word edges.'

The team believe it may be possible to predict how language development will develop in a baby from analysing how they perform in touch tests

A total of 48 English-learning 4-months-olds were tested at Purdue's Infant Speech Lab in two groups as they sat on a parent's lap facing an experimenter while listening to a pre-recorded continuous stream of speech of nonsense words.

The team believe it may be possible to predict how language development will develop

'I am interested in whether we can predict babies' language later on from early measures of speech perception,' Seidl said.

'If we look at speech perception and learning in a 6-month-old can we predict their language ability at 3 years? If we can find out what kinds of learners young children are, we could target their learning environment to their learning style.'

A total of 48 English-learning 4-months-olds were tested at Purdue's Infant Speech Lab in two groups as they sat on a parent's lap facing an experimenter while listening to a pre-recorded continuous stream of speech of nonsense words.

In the first experiment, every time a nonsense word, such as 'dobita,' was spoken, the experimenter touched the baby's knee.

Following this listening, the babies participated in a language preference study, and almost all showed that they had pulled 'dobita' out of the continuous stream of speech.

In the second experiment, the same format of continuous speech and new words was played, but the experimenter touched his or her eyebrow or chin instead of the baby.

The children in this experiment did not show that they had pulled out any words.

'It didn't matter how much time the infant spent looking at the experimenter's face, the babies were not able to use these cues in the same way as they were when their own body was touched,' said Seidl, who is now looking at individual differences in how parents speak and touch their baby.