People wanting to learn a new language should make sure they get plenty of sleep, suggests a new study.
Shut-eye is critical for all sorts of reasons, but an international team of scientists has discovered a new incentive for getting eight hours of sleep every night: it helps the brain to store and learn a new language.
The study, led by the University of South Australia, revealed that the coordination of two electrical events in the sleeping brain “significantly” improves our ability to remember new words and complex grammatical rules.
In an experiment with 35 native English-speaking adults, researchers tracked the brain activity of participants learning a miniature language called Mini Pinyin that is based on Mandarin but with similar grammatical rules to English.
Mini Pinyin contains 32 verbs and 25 nouns, including 10 human entities, 10 animals and five objects. Overall, the language contains 576 unique sentences.
Half of the participants learned Mini Pinyin in the morning and then returned in the evening to have their memory tested.
The other half learned Mini Pinyin in the evening and then slept in the laboratory overnight while their brain activity was recorded. Researchers tested their progress in the morning.
The results showed that the act of sleeping “significantly” aided the learning of the new language. Those who didn’t sleep between their lessons and their test performed much worse that the group who got to sleep after lessons, according to the findings published in the Journal of Neuroscience
Lead researcher Dr. Zachariah Cross says sleep-based improvements were linked to the coupling of slow oscillations and sleep spindles—brainwave patterns that synchronize during NREM sleep.
“Post-sleep neural activity showed unique patterns of theta oscillations associated with cognitive control and memory consolidation, suggesting a strong link between sleep-induced brainwave co-ordination and learning outcomes.”
University of South Australia researcher Dr. Scott Coussens says the study underscores the importance of sleep in learning complex linguistic rules.
“By demonstrating how specific neural processes during sleep support memory consolidation, we provide a new perspective on how sleep disruption impacts language learning.
“Sleep is not just restful; it’s an active, transformative state for the brain.”
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