If you want to learn a new language, get a good night’s sleep.
A University of South Australia-led study found getting eight hours of sleep every night helped the brain to store and learn the new information.
Lead researcher Dr Zachariah Cross said the study revealed that the coordination of two electrical events in the sleeping brain significantly improved a person’s ability to remember new words and complex grammatical rules.
Dr Cross said in an experiment with native English-speaking adults, researchers tracked the brain activity of participants learning a miniature language called Mini Pinyin that was based on Mandarin but with similar grammatical rules to English.
He said half of the participants learned Mini Pinyin in the morning and then returned in the evening to have their memory tested, while the other half learned Mini Pinyin in the evening and then slept in the laboratory overnight while their brain activity was recorded.
“Those who slept performed significantly better compared to those who remained awake,” Dr Cross said.
He said sleep-based improvements were linked to the coupling of slow oscillations and sleep spindles – brainwave patterns that synchronise during NREM sleep.
“This coupling likely reflects the transfer of learned information from the hippocampus to the cortex, enhancing long-term memory storage.”
UniSA researcher Scott Coussens said the study underscored 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,” Dr Coussens said.
“Sleep is not just restful. It’s an active, transformative state for the brain.”
He said the findings could potentially inform treatments for individuals with language-related impairments, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and aphasia, who experienced greater sleep disturbances than other adults.
“Understanding how the brain works during sleep has implications beyond language learning. It could revolutionise how we approach education, rehabilitation, and cognitive training.”
Read the full study: Slow oscillation-spindle coupling predicts sequence-based language learning.
