The underpinnings of linguistic optimisation in comprehension

睡眠、可塑性和记忆巩固机制对于成功的成人交流至关重要，特别是当一种语言涉及到一个新单词时。最近，一个有趣的补充，这一文献开辟了一个新的潜在作用的记忆巩固，这一次超越简单的新奇。我们小组最近的一项研究表明，睡眠和记忆巩固也可以支持日常语言理解，即使在没有新语言单位的情况下。在这里，我们全面解决这些记忆系统是否以及如何支持理解。这里考虑了睡眠和记忆巩固在理解中的三种可能作用：1）它们帮助我们完善单词的心理表征，以确保未来的最佳理解。2）它们帮助我们跟踪对话中提到的语言事件，3）它们帮助我们识别和保持说话者，语言使用方式的特定偏好。所有这些角色都可以被认为是优化我们在对话或阅读和写作中使用语言的能力的方法。事实上，这些角色中的任何一个或所有都可能被证明是正确的，而且一个令人兴奋的可能性是，在某种程度上，可能存在一个框架，可以将语言理解的这些不同方面统一起来，这些方面都基于相同的潜在记忆过程。目前的提案开发和测试了这些账户，使我们能够首次了解睡眠和记忆巩固在多大程度上支持和维持我们日常使用语言的能力。

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.