ABSTRACT
This chapter describes work investigating the relationship between daily sleep in early development and vocabulary at older ages, followed by experimental work investigating the effects of daytime and nighttime sleep on retention of new language learning in children. It investigates links between developmental language delay and sleep and discusses how sleep supports memory consolidation and how children’s brain development at different ages may constrain the nature of their memory formation. The chapter deals with a discussion of the implications of these constraints for how children acquire language. A range of external factors may play a role in children’s sleep consolidation, which would in turn influence the relationship between sleep and language outcomes. The degree of the influence of external factors on sleep consolidation may also change across development, which could further cloud the relationship between sleep and language outcomes. Impaired language learners also show lexical integration of the novel word forms, adding to the idea that they exhibit intact consolidation.
