Parents and caretakers diving into homeschooling this week might be learning just how hard teaching can be. For those trying to boost their child’s vocabulary, there’s one method that might help the cause: Let your kid sleep on it.
New research in the journal Royal Society Open Science suggests that kids in grade school with somewhat poor vocabulary could have a better chance of remembering new words if they learn them in the evening, close to bedtime.
One way researchers gauge how well someone has learned a new term is by whether they confuse it with a similar-sounding word. “When we are listening to or reading words, multiple candidate words become activated simultaneously,” Lisa Henderson, a psychologist with the University of York and study co-author, said in an email. “If we hear ‘Brexit,’ we might also fleetingly activate ‘breakfast.’ ” If someone has to figure out which of the words ...
