Babies love a beat, according to a new study that found dancing comes naturally to infants. The research showed babies respond to the rhythm of  16  , and find it more interesting than speech. The findings, based  17  a study of 120 infants between five months and two years old, suggest that humans may be born with a 18  to move rhythmically in response to music. Researchers find that it is the beat  19 other features of the music, such as the melody,  20 produces the response in infants. They  21 found that the better the children’s movements were able to coincide with the music, the more they smiled.To test babies’ reaction to music, the researchers   22  recordings of classical music, rhythmic beats and speech to infants, and videotaped the  23 . In addition, they recruited professional ballet dancers to analyze how well the babies   24  their movements to the music. During the experiments, each baby was sitting on a parent’s lap. The adults had   25  on to make sure they couldn’t hear the music, and they were  26  not to move. The researchers found the babies moved their arms, hands, legs, feet and heads in response to the music,   27   than to speech.It    28  to be understood why humans have developed this   29  reaction. One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for   30  function that just happens to be relevant to music processing. Though the ability appears to be innate in humans, the researchers aren’t sure why it evolved.

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