Can't justify the price of admission to the full text thus I have no comment, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24962994
More info: Learn Dutch in Your Sleep Neither article says how pronounced the effect is. Just as with medical studies in general, the relative effect is often highlighted, while the absolute effect remains unimpressively low. The 2nd article also notes, as expected, that this only works with prior learned material, and not with new. While not stated explicitly, I think the original learning of the words was done with audio, rather than via reading and then cued with audio during sleep. An easy to test course would be vocabulearn. That is if you can get to sleep with it playing in background on a loop.
I find it worrying that their control group was kept awake well past two in the morning. Sounds unnecessary really. How about if the control group had been given the words at ten in the morning and then tested in the afternoon, when sleep deprivation wouldn't have been an issue...?
Good point. The control group should have had the exact same conditions except for the cueing. Otherwise that factor is not properly isolated. One thus wonders if the sleep deprivation was intentional to produce a better result for someone's pet theory.
In fact, I detect some world-class weaselling.... The two sentences are markedly different. Notice that in the second sentence both comparators are explicit: The volunteers who had remained awake were unable to remember words they had heard on the playback any better than those they had not. By contrast, there is no "than" in the first sentence. So does it mean that they recalled the words on playback better than the words not on playback, or that they recall the words on playback better than the control group recalled them? I would suspect the latter until and unless shown otherwise. From the wording of the press release, I'm assuming they've simply reproven that sleep deprivation messes up your head.
Memory consolidation occurs during the night, I think that's a well-known fact. I remember that one night I was reading about that before I fell sleep. Then, in the middle of the night I nipped into the kitchen for a glass of water, still half-sleep, and found myself walking and repeating a word over and over again. Then I remembered the book I had been reading and awoke. The thing is that, this same day in the morning I took a walk in the woods while listening to a podcast. That word came about and although it was new to me I recognised it because I was familiar with other word in the same family. I also understood the meaning. I repeated it twice as if to internalise it and went on with my day. Funnily-enough, another well-known fact is that you can remember a word better if you put yourself in the same context you learnt it in the first place, like while walking. So, what I'm trying to say is that it'd be cool to conduct a study where you make subjects take a stroll while they are sleep in order to boost vocabulary
