Tham Elaine K H, Lindsay Shane, Gaskell M Gareth
Department of Psychology, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom.
Neuropsychologia. 2015 May;71:146-57. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.03.025. Epub 2015 Mar 26.
Two experiments investigated effects of sleep on consolidation and integration of novel form-meaning mappings using size congruity and semantic distance paradigms. Both paradigms have been used in previous studies to measure automatic access to word meanings. When participants compare semantic or physical font size of written word-pairs (e.g. BEE-COW), judgments are typically faster if relative sizes are congruent across both dimensions. Semantic distance effects are also found for wellestablished words, with semantic size judgements faster for pairs that differ substantially on this dimension. English-speaking participants learned novel form-meaning mappings with Mandarin (Experiment 1) or Malay (Experiment 2) words and were tested following overnight sleep or a similar duration awake. Judgements on English words controlled for circadian effects. The sleep group demonstrated selective stronger size congruity and semantic distance effects for novel word-pairs. This benefit occurred in Experiment 1 for semantic size comparisons of novel words, and in Experiment 2 on comparisons where novel pairs had large distances and font differences (for congruity effects) or in congruent trials (for semantic distance effects). Conversely, these effects were equivalent across sleep and wake for English words. Experiment 2 included polysomnography data and revealed that changes in the strength of semantic distance and congruity effects were positively correlated with slow-wave sleep and sleep spindles respectively. These findings support systems consolidation accounts of declarative learning and suggest that sleep plays an active role in integrating new words with existing knowledge, resulting in increased automatic access of the acquired knowledge.
两项实验使用大小一致性和语义距离范式，研究了睡眠对新的形式-意义映射的巩固和整合的影响。这两种范式在以往的研究中都被用于测量对词义的自动提取。当参与者比较书面单词对（如BEE-COW）的语义或物理字体大小时，如果两个维度上的相对大小一致，判断通常会更快。对于已确立的单词也发现了语义距离效应，在该维度上差异较大的单词对的语义大小判断更快。以英语为母语的参与者学习了与普通话（实验1）或马来语（实验2）单词的新形式-意义映射，并在过夜睡眠或类似时长的清醒状态后进行测试。对英语单词的判断控制了昼夜节律效应。睡眠组对新单词对表现出更强的大小一致性和语义距离效应。这种益处出现在实验1中对新单词的语义大小比较中，以及实验2中对新单词对具有大距离和字体差异（对于一致性效应）或在一致试验（对于语义距离效应）的比较中。相反，对于英语单词，这些效应在睡眠和清醒状态下是等效的。实验2包括多导睡眠图数据，结果显示语义距离和一致性效应强度的变化分别与慢波睡眠和睡眠纺锤波呈正相关。这些发现支持了陈述性学习的系统巩固理论，并表明睡眠在将新单词与现有知识整合方面发挥着积极作用，从而增加了对所学知识的自动提取。
