Teach ‘Em Young: Speak, Sleep, Repeat

The need to sleep changes throughout life. After birth, we start off sleeping most of the day, we then take regular naps as toddlers and develop a clear day-night rhythm, but by the end of life we feel the need to revert back to napping. While seemingly peaceful from the outside, the brain is actually performing some of its most important tasks during sleep, such as the consolidation of memories and learning life long skills.

Infants and toddlers vary widely in their rate of early word learning – variation that is predictive of later language development and school success. In this talk, Prof Larissa Samuelson will discuss the difficulties children face when learning even a single concrete noun, and the work being done in UEA’s Developmental Dynamics Laboratory to understand individual children’s unique word learning pathways – work with the goal of informing interventions for children struggling to learn words.