This paper came out in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
It was led by Dr Matthew Mak, based at the University of York.
This work explores how we track and adjust our knowledge about word meanings as instances of a word are encountered, with particular focus on the role of sleep in this process. In Experiment 1, participants encountered low-ambiguity words (e.g., bathtub) in sentences that biased their meanings towards a specific interpretation (e.g., bathtub-slip vs. bathtub-relax). In Experiment 2, participants encountered word-class ambiguous words (e.g., loan) in sentences where the words were used in their dispreferred word class (e.g., “He will loan me money”). Both experiments showed that such sentential experience influenced later interpretation and usage of the words more after a night’s sleep than a day awake
We interpret these results as evidence for a general role of episodic memory in language comprehension such that new episodic memories are formed every time a sentence is comprehended, and these memories contribute to lexical processing next time the word is encountered, as well as potentially to the fine-tuning of long-term lexical knowledge.
The Word Lab at UCL 