A recent study revealed that getting eight hours of sleep can have linguistic benefits and it helped adults speak a new language.
It is said that when one sleeps, the brain is known to integrate all the information learnt during the day with previous knowledge to file it for long-term storage.
The researchers at the University of South Australia monitored the brain activity in 35 native English-speaking adults as they were learning 'Mini Pinyin', a miniature language for studying language learning and incremental sentence processing. The language has grammatical rules similar to that of English.
In the study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, half of the participants learnt 'Mini Pinyin' in the morning and later in the evening returned to have their memory tested.
The other half learnt the miniature language in the evening and then slept at the lab overnight, while their brain activity got recorded. The progress of the research was tested in the morning.
Those who slept were found to perform significantly better, compared to those who remained awake before having their memory tested.
"We found that sleep relative to wake was associated with superior performance for rules that followed a sequence-based word order," the authors wrote.
Lead researcher Zachariah Cross, a PhD holder from the University of South Australia told media that improvements in memory because of sleep were related to the linking of slow oscillations and sleep spindles, which are brainwave patterns that synchronise during the non-REM phase of sleep.
While explaining the non-REM phase, Cross said that non-rapid eye movement (REM) is the restful phase of sleep when eyes stop moving and during which muscles relax, and brain activity, breathing and heart rate slow down.
"This coupling (linking) likely reflects the transfer of learned information from the hippocampus to the cortex, enhancing long-term memory storage," said Cross.
According to the researchers, the findings could potentially inform treatments for individuals with language-related impairments, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and aphasia, who experience greater sleep disturbances than other adults.
Increasing slow oscillations could accelerate aphasia-based speech and language therapy, Cross said.
