The effect of sleep and semantic information on associative novel word learning

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the effect of overnight sleep on associative novel word learning and examined whether the effects of sleep on word learning are modulated by the provision of semantic information. Seventy-five healthy young adults attended an initial word-learning session followed by a delayed testing session. An interval of overnight sleep (sleep group) or daytime wakefulness (wake group) separated the two sessions. At the initial learning session, participants learned three-word names of 20 novel objects, where half the names comprised a novel word and two semantic attributes (semantic condition), and half comprised a novel word and two meaningless proper names (name condition). Novel word cued-recall was measured at both the initial and the delayed session. Although both groups demonstrated similar cued-recall accuracy at the first session, by the delayed session the sleep group demonstrated superior cued-recall accuracy compared to the wake group. There was no influence of semantics on the sleep-dependent consolidation of the novel words. Overall, these findings suggest that novel words encoded with or without the provision of semantic information can benefit from an overnight sleep period for consolidation.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory consolidation
• sleep
• associative learning
• semantics
• novel words

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Jonathon Cronk for his assistance with data processing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted with support from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (Project ID: CE140100041). This research was supported by the Australian Government under a Research Training Program Scholarship awarded to Emma Schimke.