THE CONTRIBUTION OF SLEEP TO LANGUAGE LEARNING IN YOUNG CHILDREN

Abstract

In general, sleep and memory might seem like completely unrelated topics. However, past research has shown that sleep plays a crucial role in the process of consolidating memories, retaining information, and learning language. In infancy, we see children sleep for a majority of the hours in a day – roughly 10 hours at night combined with a nap or two during the day, depending on age. The current literature on sleep suggests that naps in early childhood are necessary for improving cognitive and behavioral outcomes later in life. In addition, naps help infants protect new memories from external interferences before they can be fully encoded. Once children reach age 5, there is typically a decline in napping behavior, indicating that the child has developed the necessary mechanisms in their brain for processing memories during wakefulness. This review will encompass the physiology of sleep in young children, memory benefits of sleep, and how sleep and language learning are related. Finally, there is a discussion on encoding and the hippocampus, sleep and vocabulary expansion in older children, and future research questions.