Sleep and Language-Learning

The Power of Sleep in Language-Learning: Multilingual Dreams and Night-Time Word Acquisition

• Multilinguals often use different languages in their dreams, which can be influenced by daytime worries, memories, and problems.
• Dream languages may be categorized by person, location, or life stage, and may be layered with questions of culture and identity.
• Sleep researchers have found that our brains process languages and learn new words during sleep, particularly during slow-wave sleep.
• During slow-wave sleep, the hippocampus passes new information to other parts of the brain, where it can be stored and connected to other relevant information.
• Multilingual people store foreign words within their mental lexicon, which are chosen or suppressed in a similar way to their native language.
• Sleep also helps us integrate and consolidate old and new knowledge, which allows us to choose the right word in any given situation and suppress competing words.
• Dreams may help consolidate memories and tidy up rough edges during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) phase, which is characterized by complex dreams.
• Our brain can learn new words while asleep, but we can't generally use that information in a conscious, explicit way when awake.
• The potential role of multilingual dreams in night-time learning is still unclear, but dreams may allow us to try out new words or phrases in different scenarios and explore emotions around the languages we speak.
• Wrestling with words or tasks in our dreams may help with creative word-play and problem-solving when awake, as well as emotional processing.
• Multilingual dreams can express fears and desires around learning a foreign language, including the yearning to be a native-like speaker.
• Understanding the brain's night-time acrobatics highlights the hidden effort it takes to learn even a single word and can lead to the acquisition of new foreign words, such as "hypnopédie," French for the act of learning in your sleep.