Abstract
Evidence is growing for the involvement of consolidation processes in the learning and retention of language, largely based on instances of new linguistic components (e.g., new words). Here, we assessed whether consolidation effects extend to the semantic processing of highly familiar words. The experiments were based on the word-meaning priming paradigm in which a homophone is encountered in a context that biases interpretation towards the subordinate meaning. The homophone is subsequently used in a word-association test to determine whether the priming encounter facilitates the retrieval of the primed meaning. In Experiment 1 (N = 74), we tested the resilience of priming over periods of 2 and 12 h that were spent awake or asleep, and found that sleep periods were associated with stronger subsequent priming effects. In Experiment 2 (N = 55) we tested whether the sleep benefit could be explained in terms of a lack of retroactive interference by testing participants 24 h after priming. Participants who had the priming encounter in the evening showed stronger priming effects after 24 h than participants primed in the morning, suggesting that sleep makes priming resistant to interference during the following day awake. The results suggest that consolidation effects can be found even for highly familiar linguistic materials. We interpret these findings in terms of a contextual binding account in which all language perception provides a learning opportunity, with sleep and consolidation contributing to the updating of our expectations, ready for the next day.
Highlights
Over the last 20 years, a substantial body of psycholinguistic research has uncovered remarkable plasticity in the adult system
Experiment 1 was the first attempt to examine the robustness of word-meaning priming over relatively extended periods of time (2 and 12 h) that varied in terms of whether the intervening period included sleep or not
If we had observed a significant correlation between the changes in performance and slow-wave sleep duration or spindle activity for the participants napping in the lab, this would have strengthened the case for the effect being driven by consolidation during sleep
Summary
Over the last 20 years, a substantial body of psycholinguistic research has uncovered remarkable plasticity in the adult system. Interference from learning a new word (e.g., “cathedruke”) on the recognition of its existing neighbour (e.g., cathedral) tends not to be observed immediately ( cf McMurray, Kapnoula, & Gaskell, 2016), but instead emerges after a period of sleep (Dumay & Gaskell, 2007) and is associated with the prevalence of spindle activity (brief ∼12–15 Hz bursts of activity in non-REM sleep) during the intervening night (Tamminen et al, 2010) These observations can be explained by systems consolidation models (e.g., Rasch & Born, 2013) applied to language learning (Davis & Gaskell, 2009) in which sleep provides an opportunity for new hippocampally mediated memories to be replayed (Ji & Wilson, 2007; Nadel, Hupbach, Gomez, & Newman-Smith, 2012)
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