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Talking to yourself can benefit thinking and perception, according to a new study. 

Researchers conducted several experiments with adult volunteers, and found talking to yourself as you search for something may help you find that item faster.

"The general take-home point is that language is not just a system of communication, but I'm arguing it can augment perception, augment thinking," Gary Lupyan, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told LiveScience.

In one experiment, the team presented participants with 20 pictures of different objects and asked them to look for a specific one, such as a banana. In half of the trials, volunteers were asked to repeatedly say what they were looking for out loud to themselves; in the others, they were asked to remain silent. 

Those talking to themselves completed the task faster by about 50 to 100 milliseconds. (The average time it took volunteers to find an item was 1.2 to 2 seconds.)

In another experiment, the psychologists also had the study participants look at pictures of supermarket items, and then look for them in a virtual supermarket. 

Speaking the name of an item was advantageous only when participants looked for familiar objects. For example, saying "Coke" helped when looking for Coke, but saying the less familiar item "Speed Stick" when looking for Speed Stick deodorant actually slowed people down.

The study was published online April 10 in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.