Horváth Klára, Myers Kyle, Foster Russell, Plunkett Kim
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
J Sleep Res. 2015 Oct;24(5):503-9. doi: 10.1111/jsr.12306. Epub 2015 May 7.
Little is known about the role that night-time sleep and daytime naps play in early cognitive development. Our aim was to investigate how napping affects word learning in 16-month-olds. Thirty-four typically developing infants were assigned randomly to nap and wake groups. After teaching two novel object-word pairs to infants, we tested their initial performance with an intermodal preferential looking task in which infants are expected to increase their target looking time compared to a distracter after hearing its auditory label. A second test session followed after approximately a 2-h delay. The delay contained sleep for the nap group or no sleep for the wake group. Looking behaviour was measured with an automatic eye-tracker. Vocabulary size was assessed using the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory. A significant interaction between group and session was found in preferential looking towards the target picture. The performance of the nap group increased after the nap, whereas that of the wake group did not change. The gain in performance correlated positively with the expressive vocabulary size in the nap group. These results indicate that daytime napping helps consolidate word learning in infancy.
关于夜间睡眠和白天小睡在早期认知发展中所起的作用，我们知之甚少。我们的目的是研究小睡如何影响16个月大婴儿的词汇学习。34名发育正常的婴儿被随机分为小睡组和清醒组。在向婴儿教授两对新的物体-单词对后，我们用一种跨通道偏好注视任务测试了他们的初始表现，在这个任务中，预计婴儿在听到目标的听觉标签后，与分心物相比会增加对目标的注视时间。大约2小时后进行了第二次测试。这段延迟时间里，小睡组婴儿睡觉，清醒组婴儿不睡觉。使用自动眼动仪测量注视行为。使用牛津交际发展量表评估词汇量。在对目标图片的偏好注视方面，发现组和测试阶段之间存在显著交互作用。小睡组婴儿小睡后的表现有所提高，而清醒组婴儿的表现没有变化。小睡组婴儿表现的提高与表达性词汇量呈正相关。这些结果表明，白天小睡有助于巩固婴儿期的词汇学习。
