Effects of sleep on learning morphophonological alternations

Abstract

In this experiment, we examine the contribution of sleep-based memory consolidation to the learning of morphophonological alternations in an artificial grammar. Periods of sleep after training seem to help participants to retain word formation patterns that they have previously learned, and also generalize learned word formation patterns to novel stimuli (Bryant et al., 2020; Dumay & Gaskell, 2007, 2012; Gomez, 2017; Gómez & Edgin, 2015; Sandoval et al., 2017; Simon et al., 2017). As our previous work has shown, Arabiclike morphology is particularly difficult for English-speaking participants to learn and retain, despite L1 transfer (Drake, under review), varying the type of instructions provided (Drake et al., 2022a), and multi-talker training (Drake et al., 2022b). In this ongoing work, we, therefore, compare participants’ accuracy rates after three periods of delay (no delay, delay without sleep, delay with sleep) to find out whether sleep aids in learning, generalizing, and retaining abstract morphological structure, and whether accuracy differs for the Englishlike or Arabiclike morphophonological alternations learned.