Two-year-olds consolidate verb meanings during a nap

Abstract

Successful word learning requires establishing an initial representation that is sufficiently robust to be retained in memory. Sleep has profound advantages for memory consolidation, but evidence concerning the effects of sleep in young children's word learning is slim and focuses almost exclusively on learning nouns. Verbs are representationally more complex and are often learned from non-concurrent linguistic and observational information (e.g., hearing "let's pour your milk" before the pouring event takes place). What remains unknown is whether initial representations built this way are robust enough to sustain a delay, and how these representations are affected by sleep. We presented two-year-olds with non-concurrent linguistic and observational information about novel verbs and immediately tested their knowledge of the verbs' meanings by evaluating their eye gaze as they looked at potential referents. Then, after a 4-hour delay during which half of the children napped and half remained awake, we retested them to see if they remembered the verbs' meanings. The results demonstrate differences in two-year-olds' representations of a novel verb before and after the delay; specifically, their verb representations withstood the 4-hour delay if they had napped, but decayed if they had remained awake.

Keywords: Memory; Sleep; Syntactic bootstrapping; Verb learning; Word learning.

Figure 1.

Design of one example trial (from a total of 4). The visual stimuli were recordings of live actors in conversation and live actors acting on other actors or on objects. The auditory stimuli were recordings of a female native English speaker speaking in child-directed speech. The materials were presented on a 24-inch widescreen eye-tracker monitor (Tobii T60XL; Studio 2.0), which recorded the coordinates of children’s gaze at a rate of 60 frames/sec.

Figure 2.

Fixation time course and growth curve model fit