By Kerry M. Flynn
Published: Thursday, November 04, 2010
College students studying foreign languages should take heed of a study recently published by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of York, which found that newly acquired words are better integrated in a person’s memory after sleep.
University of Manchester research associate Jakke Tamminen—who spent three months at Harvard last year—and his team studied how brain activity during sleep affects integrating new memories, drawing on previous research about how sleep strengthens memory in general.
The researchers taught volunteers new, made-up words that sounded similar to existing words, such as “cathedruke.”
The volunteers were tested on the words, slept overnight in the lab while researchers measured their brain activity, and then were tested again in the morning. The second test showed that volunteers could recognize more words and at a greater speed after sleep.
Members of the control group, who were tested in the morning and the evening after completing a normal day, were not able to recognize the words more quickly than they had in the morning.
“When you’re just learning a new word, it’s not yet in your brain in a way that it is after sleep,” said Robert A. Stickgold ’66, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. [Read more here]
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