Language abstraction: Consolidation of language structure during sleep

Recent research on how sleep influences cognitive processes has pointed to the potential role of sleep in the consolidation and generalisation of information across a range of tasks, including some language learning tasks (i.e., Gómez, Bootzin, & Nadel, 2006; Wagner, Gais, Haider, Verleger, & Born, 2004; Walker, 2005). The current study investigated the role of sleep in grammatical category generalisation by testing participants for categorical knowledge 12 hours after initial training. Participants were tested on their categorisation of the training words and also on their ability to generalize to novel, but consistent category words. The sleep group received training at 9pm and the wake group at 9am. Only the sleep group was able to abstract the general category characteristics to the novel category words which implies a domain general abstraction mechanism may be influential in language acquisition.