THE ROLE OF NAPS IN FOUR-YEAR-OLD WORD LEARNING AND INFERENCE

Abstract

Napping has been shown to provide many benefits for children and adults. This thesis investigates a nap’s potential for four-year-old children to remember novel objects and make inferences about their functions. To explore these aims, children were exposed to labels and functions for each of four novel objects in two separate learning tasks. Children never saw the functions for the objects demonstrated at the same time as hearing their labels. Children were tested on their ability to remember the names of the objects through an Object-Label task and their ability to infer the correct label for a function in a Label-Function task. Children who nap soon after learning are expected to perform at a higher level and show better retention than those who do not. Significant results were obtained for the Nap and Wakefulness groups on the Label-Object task but not for the group tested immediately after training. The Nap group showed numerically higher performance at inferring the correct label for the function in the Label-Function task comparted to the immediate and wakefulness groups, highlighting the potential that a nap has to improve a child’s generalization.