AI Article Synopsis
- Sleep talking (ST) involves verbal vocalizations during sleep and may relate to memory and language processes, but its connection to sleep quality and cognitive functions is not well understood.
- A study with 29 sleep talkers and 30 healthy participants examined their sleep patterns and dreams over a week while recording their vocal activations.
- Findings indicated that sleep talkers experienced poorer sleep quality and more sleep fragmentation, but both groups had similar memory consolidation rates, suggesting ST could be linked to cognitive processes despite being a benign occurrence.
Article Abstract
Background: Sleep talking (ST) is characterized by the production of unaware verbal vocal activations (VBs) during sleep. ST seems potentially linked to linguistic and memory consolidation processes. However, sleep and dream characteristics and the relationship between verbal vocalizations (VBs) and cognitive functions are still unknown. Our study aimed to investigate qualitative sleep and dream features in sleep talkers (STs) compared to healthy subjects (CNTs) through retrospective and longitudinal measures and explore the relationship between ST and memory consolidation.
Methods: We recruited N = 29 STs and N = 30 CNTs (age range of 18-35). Participants recorded their dreams and filled out sleep logs for seven consecutive days. Vocal activations of STs were audio-recorded. On the eighth day, we administered a word-pair task.
Results: We showed that STs had significantly worse self-reported sleep quality. VBs were positively correlated with sleep fragmentation and negatively associated with the oneiric emotional load. No difference between groups was found in the memory consolidation rate.
Conclusions: Although ST is a benign phenomenon, we revealed that ST is associated with more sleep alterations and lower emotional intensity of dreams. In this vein, we support that ST depends on sleep fragmentation and could represent a potential window into sleep-dependent cognitive processes.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9658338 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jcm11216489 | DOI Listing |
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