Abstract
Acquiring language requires segmenting speech into individual words, and abstracting over those words to discover grammatical structure. However, these tasks can be conflicting—on the one hand requiring memorisation of precise sequences that occur in speech, and on the other requiring a flexible reconstruction of these sequences to determine the grammar. Here, we examine whether speech segmentation and generalisation of grammar can occur simultaneously—with the conflicting requirements for these tasks being over-come by sleep-related consolidation. After exposure to an artificial language comprising words containing non-adjacent dependencies, participants underwent periods of consolidation involving either sleep or wake. Participants who slept before testing demonstrated a sustained boost to word learning and a short-term improvement to grammatical generalisation of the non-adjacencies, with improvements after sleep outweighing gains seen after an equal period of wake. Thus, we propose that sleep may facilitate processing for these conflicting tasks in language acquisition, but with enhanced benefits for speech segmentation.
Highlights
Language acquisition is complex: learners must process information for multiple linguistic tasks quickly, simultaneously, and online, from the same transient input [1]
Within the statistical learning literature there are divided opinions over the type of computation applied to grammatical processing [5, 6], where one view is that similar statistical operations apply to both segmentation and grammatical tasks [2, 7, 8, 9], and the alternative is that the operations are qualitatively distinct, with statistical processing for segmentation, but symbolic algebraic computations applying to grammatical tasks [10, 11, 12]
Studies of non-adjacent dependency learning have demonstrated that learners can perform these tasks simultaneously when the non-adjacencies contain new intervening items [8]—suggesting that segmentation and generalisation may be governed by the same type of statistical process, contrary to prior suggestion [11, 12]
Summary
Language acquisition is complex: learners must process information for multiple linguistic tasks quickly, simultaneously, and online, from the same transient input [1]. One way of strengthening the memory representations of words and grammatical rules is through sleep-related consolidation, which could potentially support learning specific instances and abstraction of structure simultaneously through the separation of these processes during sleep [19]. This would mean that sleep may enable segmentation and generalisation to improve at the same time, but independently of one another. If the time-course of sleep-related learning is the same for these tasks, we would expect to see similar patterns of improvement for segmentation and generalisation
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