Multi-session training in the evening schedule exhibits enhanced speech learning

Abstract

Speech learning can be influenced by a variety of factors. A growing body of literature suggests a significant influence of sleep on speech learning, i.e., those trained in the evening outperform those trained in the morning most probably due to consolidation of learning that happens during the sleep for the evening group. Since, learning, in general, may be a process that spans multiple sessions, in the current exploratory study, we aimed at investigating the effect of a multi-session training paradigm on the learning performance of the morning vs evening group. We compared young adults who were trained in the morning (8-10 am; n = 16) with those who were trained in the evening (6-8 pm; n = 16) on a Hindi dental-retroflex pseudoword-picture association training paradigm. Overall, we found that the evening group learned to a larger extent both for the identification (on trained items) and discrimination (on untrained items) tasks. The current findings, even with a multi-session paradigm, are consistent with the previous findings that support enhanced performance by training in the evening. These findings may have clinical implications toward scheduling of speech therapy.