The relationship between sleep and learning has already been identified and identified as beneficial to adults and adolescents.
Now, self-interest at the University of Sussex d. Jessica Horst and doctoral student Sophie Williams showed that three-year-olds who take a nap after reading stories will perform better in learning new words later.
Their study involved 48 British children, half of whom took afternoon nap, and half did not.
They were read to either the same story, or three different stories, but to be exposed to the same number of strange words each time.
When the tests were done two and a half hours later, after 24 hours and a week later, the children who had taken a nap after hearing the story showed much better performance than those who did not sleep.
Significantly, children who read three different stories before they slept showed a 33% better performance than those who stayed awake after hearing these stories.
In later tests, the researchers found that those who stayed awake could not keep up with their peers remembering words.
This has been demonstrated by previous studies of d. Horst said that reading the same story to a child instead of different stories was more useful for learning new words.
But the new study shows that sleep can also have a very large extra effect, especially when the child listens to different stories.
Dr. Horst noted that many studies have shown that children of our time are sleeping less than ever and even less than recommended periods.
Chronic sleep deprivation is closely associated with low ability to deal with vocabulary, child obesity and alien behaviors such as tantrums.
"Many pre-school children take afternoon nap.
But the siesta periods within the classrooms have been greatly reduced to keep up with rising academic demands, "she adds. "
"Given the growing body of evidence that stabilizing sleep has a significant impact on children's learning, such policies can carry enormous risks for our children."
"In fact, the results of similar studies of the current study indicate that we should encourage young children to nap, and we should take advantage of the pre-napping period to guide children in basic academic areas such as learning words and arithmetic."