How Sleep Helps Children Learn and Remember New Words

Published: March 13, 2020

Katherine Esterline: Are you ready?

Toddler #1: Yeah!

Onscreen: How does sleep help children learn and remember new words?

Esterline: Wow, a zet.

Rebecca Gomez: We’re teaching children novel words for a completely novel objects.

Esterline: Look at these.

Gomez: We use this completely new information, so we can measure the brain’s ability to form completely novel, completely new memories.

Esterline: Hey, a beev.

Gomez: So, in essence, we’re measuring brute force memory.

Toddler #1: What’s this?

Narrator: The kids are shown four objects they’ve never seen before, that have been given nonsense names, like zet...

Esterline: Wow, a zet. Cool.

Narrator: …mup...

Esterline: A mup.

Narrator: …beev...

Esterline: A beev.

Narrator: …and toap.

Esterline: A toap.

Toddler #1: Toap.

Narrator: They get a chance to look at the objects…

Esterline: Look at these.

Narrator: …and even touch them. Then, half of the toddlers go home for their afternoon nap, while the other half don’t nap for hours or perhaps not at all.

The next day, they’re back.

Esterline: Where’s the zet?

Narrator: How much do they remember?

Gomez: What we found is that the children who nap soon after learning…

Esterline: Mup?

Gomez: …remember the words about 80 percent of the time.

Toddler #1: Toap.

Esterline: Where’s the zet?

Gomez: In contrast, the kids who went through a long period of time before they napped...

Esterline: Where’s the zet?

Gomez: …only remembered the words about 30 percent of the time.

Esterline: Where’s the toap?

Toddler #2: This?

Gomez: So you see a huge difference between 80 percent of the time and 30 percent of the time and that’s the difference the nap makes.

Esterline: Where’s the mup?

Toddler #3: Right here.

Narrator: Why did a nap make all the difference? The key lays inside a tiny organ found deep within the brain, the hippocampus. We have one in each hemisphere, and they play a critical role in helping us learn and remember.

Spencer: So, think of it this way. I have a little filing drawer beside my desk, and throughout the day, as papers come in, I toss them in this drawer. It’s my mail that came today; it’s some papers that I had from a class; that’s my temporary storage. The hippocampus is like that short-term filing drawer. A mishmash of information getting squeezed in, and there’s a limited amount of room there for that. But at the end of the day, I can take that information and turn around to my whole huge filing cabinet, which in this case is the cortex. The cortex, it’s bigger, and it has a really nice sorting mechanism. You can sort things by their visual components, by their auditory components. That memory becomes easier to find. So the role of slow-wave sleep is to take that information that’s been stuffed into the hippocampus and help move it to its more efficient filing system, out in the cortex.

Matt Walker: Things that you learned yesterday are now transferred to a safer storage location. But second, when you wake up in the morning, your hippocampus has now been cleared out, and you have a refreshed capacity for new file acquisition, all over again.

Narrator: And that brings us back to our toddlers and the power of the midday nap. Why does it make such a big difference? Why is it so important for toddlers to clear out that short-term filing draw?

Researchers have a theory.

Gomez: Young children, their brains are still developing, and, in fact, the hippocampus is still in the process of developing all across the childhood years.

Rebecca Spencer: So, it does seem that the hippocampus, when it’s young and immature, such as in infancy and early childhood, perhaps those memories need to be stored more frequently or moved to the cortex more frequently.

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