The Underpinnings of Linguistic Optimisation in Comprehension, 2020-2024

It is now well-established that sleep, plasticity, and memory consolidation mechanisms are crucial for successful adult communication, particularly when a language involves a clearly novel item such as a new word. Recently, an intriguing addition to this literature opened up a new potential role for memory consolidation, this time moving beyond simple novelty. A recent study from our group suggested that sleep and memory consolidation may also operate to support everyday language comprehension even in the absence of new linguistic units. Here we comprehensively address whether and how these memory systems underpin comprehension. Three possible roles for sleep and memory consolidation in comprehension are considered here: 1) They help us to refine the mental representations of words to ensure optimal future comprehension. 2) They help us to track the linguistic events that are referred to during conversation, facilitating effective dialogue over a range of time-spans. 3) They help us to identify and maintain speaker-specific preferences in the way language is used. All of these roles can be thought of as ways of optimising our ability to use language in conversation, or in reading and writing. Indeed any or all of these roles may turn out to be correct, and an exciting possibility is that at some level there might be a framework for unifying these disparate aspects of language comprehension based on the same underlying memory processes. The current proposal develops and tests these accounts, allowing us to understand for the first time the extent to which sleep and memory consolidation underpin and maintain our day-to-day ability to use language. The data collections are available following the links provided in Related Resources.