The benefits of good sleep for language development

The night brings the best of prizes for many: the break. After many hours of work and exhausted energies, it's time to sleep to recharge batteries to start again the next day. An activity that becomes especially important for the youngest of the house, who if they do not meet these demands can face a poor development both at the academic level and in other areas.

In case there is little reason for parents to enforce a sleep schedule in their children, now a study by the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, highlights another benefit of rest. Those children who meet the recommendations of the specialists present better data in the development of the language.


Improvement in reception

The researchers started from the base that points out that during the dream the brain is still working and it is possible to learn even when you are in bed. Could this be applied to babies who are learning the linguistic codes? To answer this question, those responsible for this work brought together several children between six and eight months who introduced fantastic elements that received names such as 'Bofel' or 'Zuser'.

These terms a priori did not make any sense, only varied between the two the name given to these elements that did not exist. The mission was to check if they were able to understand the relationship between this word and the object to which it was attached. Those babies that they slept A short nap after learning, they were able to distinguish the right and the wrong name from the objects they faced.


That is to say, the brain of these children internalized the knowledge previous while they slept this little nap. The researchers also found a difference between rest time and learning level in babies. Those who stayed half an hour showed brain reactions typical of three-month-old infants that respond to the link between a visual and an acoustic stimulus.

Learning meaning

The researchers highlighted the cases of those babies that babies who slept in naps 50 minutes since they showed a brain reaction that until now had only been described in older children and adults. Specifically, the so-called 'N400 component' happened, which indicates that the meanings of the terms 'Bofel' or 'Zuser' were processed in the brain.

"Our results show that children are able to recognize the real meaning of words in their long-term memory earlier than we thought, even though the areas of brain involved are not mature enough, can be used to distinguish some words from others ", a learning that happens thanks to the rest of the little ones.


Memory that is associated with learning the meaning of words happens during the same stages during sleep. The so-called proto-words, which are those that combine simultaneously visual stimuli and acoustics, they become real words that are connected to the content.

Damián Montero

Video: Speech-Language Pathology: The Importance Of Intervention | Cincinnati Children's


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