If you sleep the right way, can you parlez-vous Francais?
Intriguing new research funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and published in the journal Nature Communications seems to say yes. If you want to learn another language, try playing a recording of new words while you catch your shuteye.
“Learning language during sleep was very trendy for a time, beginning in the 1970s when it was a common method for teaching a new language,” said Walda Jean Purcell, who for several years taught English as a second language in Switzerland.
In the new study from the universities of Zurich and Fribourg, 27 German-speaking test subjects were given Dutch vocabulary words to learn while awake. Then they fell asleep in the lab while recordings of those same vocabulary words were played. Researchers hoped to learn which variables controlled language learning – or not – during sleep.
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The researchers were building on findings from their similar 2014 study, when they confirmed that playing back new vocabulary words while test subjects slept helped them recall the words upon awakening. The verbal cuing of the Dutch words during sleep resulted in about 10 percent more words learned.
They added new wrinkles in this follow-up 2015 study. They supplied the German translations after the new Dutch words were given while the subjects slept, and they also played recordings of incorrect translations. The goal? To see if subjects would forget the correct translations they’d learned when awake.
The research confirmed that language memorization can be enhanced while sleeping.
The results were unexpected.
“We were neither able to enhance their memory, nor able to make them forget what they’d learned,” said lead researcher and biopsychologist Bjorn Rasch of the University of Fribourg, according to CNN.com.
The recorded brain wave patterns of the test subjects reflected concrete results, too. While individual Dutch words alone were played after they’d been learned during a conscious state, an enhancement was recorded in the brain waves — one that was characteristically present during sleep and recollection. These wave pattern activities disappeared after a second word (the translation) followed the first.
The methodology of the original 2014 study was more basic: The research team gave two groups of German-speakers Dutch vocabulary words to learn while awake. Then, they repeated the Dutch words to one group of subjects after they were asleep; the control group remained awake.
When researchers gathered the two groups together four hours later, they found the “sleeping” group who listened to the Dutch words during the deeper phase of sleep called “nonREM sleep” (non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep) did significantly better at recalling the Dutch vocabulary words.
The 2014 research also showed that “verbal cueing” only works when we’re exposed to the words prior to sleep, and that the “nonREM” phase of sleep is when learning occurs – and happens shortly after we fall asleep.
Intriguingly, the 2014 study also showed through EEG recordings that learning the vocabulary words while sleeping overlapped with the appearance of “theta brain waves,” associated with heightened learning when we are awake. Theta waves can be attained mainly when we are actively concentrating. We are usually in “alpha” or “beta” brain wave states.
Not everyone is buying the “learning while sleeping” theory.
Benny Lewis, a language teacher and author of “Fluent in 3 Months” who is fluent in seven languages, dismissed the theory of “passive learning” a language — whether it’s a recording in the background while we’re awake or listening to words while we sleep.
“We want short cuts to everything,” he wrote on his website. “Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators, maps, Internet browsers (and) games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.”
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Said Purcell, who taught all levels of language proficiency while living abroad, “The most effective model I used when teaching was a very structured group setting, where no one was allowed to communicate in their native language, but had to use English. I can’t envision how learning language while sleeping would be very effective on the whole — but still, it would be wonderful.”
For the Swiss-funded researchers, their new research confirms that language memorization can be enhanced while sleeping.
“For us, these results are further evidence that sleep promotes memory formation, with the brain spontaneously activating content it had (learned) beforehand,” they reported. “Now we really want to get out of the controlled situation of the sleep lab, to see whether the impact we’ve observed can also be reproduced under realistic conditions in everyday life.”
Purcell said sleep may also tell us how we’re doing with our language education.
“They say, in the language field, that when you begin dreaming in the language you are learning, it is a sign of great progress,” she said.
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