The Effects of Sleep for Generalization in 12 Month-Old Infants

Abstract

Since infants over-specify acoustic details, segregate exemplars by talker voice, and need enough variation to generalize across exemplars, it has been questioned whether sleep would promote generalization in 12-month-old infants even after they have been exposed to multiple speakers. In order to investigate this question, we placed infants in either a nap or non-nap condition to test whether they were able to generalize only after napping. Sleep was expected to result in retention of the grammatical pattern over acoustic details such as talker voice. These results were not expected for infants who did not nap after being familiarized with a grammatical structure and who remained awake between training and testing for an equal amount of time as the infants who napped. The average looking times between grammatical structures were compared to determine the presence of any significant variation. The current data show nonsignificant generalization in both nap and no nap conditions. Even after outlier elimination the data still demonstrate non-significant results. Tasks completed during wake hours in both nap and no nap conditions are considered as limitations.