Consolidation during sleep of perceptual learning of spoken language

Memory consolidation resulting from sleep has been seen broadly: in verbal list learning, spatial learning, and skill acquisition in visual and motor tasks. These tasks do not generalize across spatial locations or motor sequences, or to different stimuli in the same location. Although episodic rote...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature 2003-10, Vol.425 (6958), p.614-616
Main Authors: Fenn, Kimberly M, Nusbaum, Howard C, Margoliash, Daniel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Humans
Language
Learning
Learning - physiology
Memory - physiology
Sensory perception
Sleep
Sleep - physiology
Speech Intelligibility - physiology
Time Factors
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Memory consolidation resulting from sleep has been seen broadly: in verbal list learning, spatial learning, and skill acquisition in visual and motor tasks. These tasks do not generalize across spatial locations or motor sequences, or to different stimuli in the same location. Although episodic rote learning constitutes a large part of any organism's learning, generalization is a hallmark of adaptive behaviour. In speech, the same phoneme often has different acoustic patterns depending on context. Training on a small set of words improves performance on novel words using the same phonemes but with different acoustic patterns, demonstrating perceptual generalization. Here we show a role of sleep in the consolidation of a naturalistic spoken-language learning task that produces generalization of phonological categories across different acoustic patterns. Recognition performance immediately after training showed a significant improvement that subsequently degraded over the span of a day's retention interval, but completely recovered following sleep. Thus, sleep facilitates the recovery and subsequent retention of material learned opportunistically at any time throughout the day. Performance recovery indicates that representations and mappings associated with generalization are refined and stabilized during sleep.
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687
DOI:10.1038/nature01951