Question

It sounds almost too good to be true, but a new study on sleeping brains suggests that listening to languages while you sleep can actually help you to learn them.

For the study, researchers played recordings of foreign words and their translations to students who were enjoying slow-wave sleep. During this period, a person has little knowledge of their environment. To make sure that the results were not compromised by foreign language words that students may have had some connection with at some point in their waking lives, researchers made up the words which cannot be found in the foreign language at all.

When the students woke up, they were presented with the made-up words again without their translations. The students were then asked to imagine whether this made-up word showed an object that was either smaller or larger. This vague (not very clear) way of testing their understanding of the words is a method that is supposed to make use of the unconscious (無意識(shí)的) memory.

The researchers were surprised to find out that the students were able to correctly group the words in this way. And their accuracy rate (精確度) was 10 percent higher than accidental chance. That’s not a rate high enough to help them get ability of communicating with others in a foreign language, but it is enough to suggest that the brain is still taking in information on some level, even during sleep.

It has been long believed that sleep is important for memory, but before this research its role in memory was thought to relate only to the preservation (保存) and organization of memories that students got during wakefulness. This is the first time that memory formation ( 形 成 ) has been shown to be active during sleep. In other words, our brains are listening to the world, and learning about it, even when we are unconscious of what is happening around us.

The next step for researchers will be to see whether new information can be learned quicker during wakefulness if it was already presented during sleep. If so, it could forever change how we train our brains to learn new things. Sleep learning might become a widespread practice.

1.The word “compromised” in Paragraph 2 probably means “ ”.

A.influenced B.depended C.finished D.studied

2.What were the students asked to do in the study?

A.Group the words they heard by size. B.Repeat the words they heard in the sleep.

C.Imagine the meaning of the made-up words. D.Make up a word to describe “l(fā)arge” or “small”.

3.The researchers probably agree that .

A.sleep is necessary for a good memory B.memory formation goes on during sleep

C.listening during sleep is good for our health D.learning languages in sleep has better effects

4.What will be the researchers’ next plan?

A.To train people how to learn during sleep.

B.To dig out the reason for unconscious learning.

C.To explain the benefits of unconscious memory.

D.To study the effect of sleep learning on conscious learning.

Answer 1