BILBAO (Reuters) – sleep contributes to fix in the brain the knowledge acquired during the day and serves to improve the skills language, according to the conclusions of the work of the Belgian researcher, Nicolas Dumay, of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) San Sebastian.
Dumay research sought to delve into functions that develops the brain while sleep, an issue on which science does not have a complete answer. His experiments, says, show that during the hours of sleep brain check the words learned during the day, and those fixed in the linguistic memory.
The BCBL scientist used the learning of new words to prove his hypothesis on brain activity during sleep, says a press release from the International Basque Research Center.
According to Dumay, who developed the experiment with English vocabulary, “the words fighting among them for access to memory in our brain”, and this experiment shows that “only after sleeping words newly learned achieved the status of assimilated word”.
“Somehow, sleep makes real the words,” adds. The research of Dumay, published in the journal Cognition, specializing in the study of the brain, proved that during the hours of sleep the brain reviews the words learned during the day, improves language skills and sets the learned words.
Undergoing experimental, developed at the University of York, in United Kingdom, researcher of the BCBL showed 36 new words to 32 people. One of those words was “numesstac”, meaningless in English, pero whose composition is contained the word “mess”, very common and that means disaster or turmoil.
Five minutes after hearing such words, the participants remembered a 7% of new words and recognize the embedded words quickly.
But 24 hours later, i.e. After sleeping, the memory of the words rate rose to 12%. Most significant, according to the author of the experiment was that people were much slower to recognize the words which already knew, as a “mess”, which were buried in the proposed words.
According Dumay, this slowness in recognition of the already known words is due to that the participants in the experiment during sleep assimilated new words such as “numesstac”, which ceased to be a new Word to become assimilated short, which made it difficult for the recognition of the word “mess”.
Based on this conclusion and other previous studies on sleep and the brain, Dumay ensures that the brain more easily assimilated words learned during the night, before sleep, that during the day the brain has many other stimuli that interfere with the words learned in the morning.
In addition to this experiment, Dumay has carried out several research related to learning, Linguistics and brain. Some of his conclusions are being implemented for the development of new techniques in language teaching.
