Infant Sleep and Memory II

The role of memory-relevant components of sleep (REM sleep, non-REM sleep, sleep spindles, slow wave activity) for the individual areas of language acquisition (phonology, prosody, syntax, semantics) is examined in detail. The focus here is particularly on the differentiation between explicit (declarative) and implicit (procedural) knowledge, the respective consolidation of which in adults is promoted by different components of sleep architecture. Of particular interest is the extent to which the high proportion of REM sleep in early stages of development and the increasing proportion of non-REM sleep during development are associated with changes in sleep-related memory consolidation.