Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Vocabulary learning and regularity extraction in dyslexia: Dynamics of consolidation and benefit of sleep
Poster Session C, Saturday, September 13, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Tali Bitan1, Eva Kimel*2, Ilana Hairston3, Dafna Ben-Zion1, Yekete Akal3, Anat Prior1, Gareth Gaskell2; 1University of Haifa, Israel, 2University of York, UK, 3Tel-Hai College, Israel
Sleep benefits memory consolidation, and a reduced benefit could at least partially explain the impaired learning of regularities (e.g., morphology) reported in dyslexia. In the current study we assessed the involvement of sleep in learning of novel vocabulary and novel plural inflections based on implicit morpho-phonological regularities. We considered the temporal dynamics of these learning types and tested their association with sleep spindles and with slow-wave sleep – two types of neural activity that have been shown to benefit vocabulary consolidation. Participants were trained in the evening on the inflection of 36 novel words, in which morpho-phonological regularities were embedded, and were presented either frequently or infrequently during training. Training was followed by an immediate test of acquisition and generalization, a night in a sleep lab with a polysomnography, and three additional tests across nine days. For controls, we found that accuracy on the vocabulary test improved across the first night following learning, and the change was positively associated with slow-wave sleep duration. Memory for infrequent words declined towards Day 9, but greater spindle density during the first night was associated with a smaller decline. Mean group accuracy on trained inflections did not change overnight, but individually, the change was negatively correlated with spindle density. Accuracy on generalisation showed no change over time and no correlations with sleep characteristics. These results demonstrate that in typically developing young adults, vocabulary and grammar learning have different temporal dynamics of consolidation and distinct patterns of association with sleep metrics, and emphasise the potentially protective role of spindles for long-term memory retention. We are now analysing the data of young adults with dyslexia, comparing both their behavioural performance as well as their sleep characteristics, and the association between neural activity during sleep, and memory consolidation.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Developmental, Morphology