News
9 January, 2025
Sleep helps learn languages
Sleep is critical for all sorts of reasons, but a team of international scientists has discovered a new incentive for getting eight hours of sleep every night: it helps the brain to store and learn a new language.
A study led by the University of South Australia (UniSA) and published in the Journal of Neuroscience has revealed that the coordination of two electrical events in the sleeping brain significantly improves our ability to remember new words and complex grammatical rules.
In an experiment involving 35 native English-speaking adults, researchers tracked the brain activity of participants learning a miniature language called Mini Pinyin, which is based on Mandarin but has grammatical rules similar to English.
Participants were divided into two groups: one group learned Mini Pinyin in the morning and returned in the evening for memory testing, while the other group learned the language in the evening and slept in a laboratory overnight with their brain activity monitored. Memory tests were conducted the following morning.
The results showed that participants who slept performed significantly better than those who stayed awake.
Lead researcher Dr. Zachariah Cross explained that the improvements were linked to the coupling of slow oscillations and sleep spindles—brainwave patterns that synchronise during NREM sleep.
“This coupling likely reflects the transfer of learned information from the hippocampus to the cortex, enhancing long-term memory storage,” Dr. Cross said.
“Post-sleep neural activity showed unique patterns suggesting a strong link between sleep-induced brainwave coordination and learning outcomes.”
UniSA researcher Dr. Scott Coussens emphasised the broader implications of the findings:
“Sleep is not just restful; it’s an active, transformative state for the brain,” he said.
The study highlights the critical role of sleep in learning complex linguistic rules and suggests potential benefits for mastering other cognitive tasks.
The researchers plan to extend their work by exploring how sleep and wake dynamics influence the learning of additional complex cognitive skills in future studies.
