Associative relationships between pre-sleep sentence stimuli and reports of mental sleep experience.

The aim of this experiment was to study some linguistic relationships between pre-sleep verbal stimuli and contents of reports of mental experience during sleep. In 4 weekly sessions 16 subjects listened before sleep to a sentence stimulus, which was either semantically acceptable (SEM+) or not (SEM-), and were told to retain it for a recall test after awakening; they were awakened once each night during NREM or REM sleep and asked to report their mental experience during sleep. The relationships between the stimulus and the contents of the reports were classified using Clark's (1970) associative rules. Both pre-sleep sentence stimuli were frequently incorporated into contents of NREM and REM reports, without significant differences between the two types of sleep. The SEM+ sentence led prevalently to incorporations through paradigmatic associative relationships, while the SEM- sentence led to incorporations through both paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships. It appears that all the features of the lexical constituents of the stimulus may be involved in the processing leading to incorporation.