Episodic memory and sleep are involved in the maintenance of context-specific lexical information

Familiar words come with a wealth of associated knowledge about their variety of usage, accumulated over a lifetime. How do we track and adjust this knowledge as new instances of a word are encountered? A recent study (Gaskell, Cairney & Rodd, 2019, Cognition) found that, for homonyms (e.g., bank), sleep-associated consolidation facilitates the updating of meaning dominance. Here, we tested the generality of this finding by exposing participants to (Experiment 1; N = 125) non-homonyms (e.g., bathtub) in sentences that biased their meanings towards a specific interpretation (e.g., bathtub-slip vs. bathtub-relax), and (Experiment 2; N = 128) word-class ambiguous words (e.g., loan) in sentences where the words were used in their dispreferred word class (e.g., “He will loan me money”). Both experiments showed that such sentential experience influenced later interpretation and usage of the words more after a night’s sleep than a day awake. We interpret these results as evidence for a general role of episodic memory in language comprehension such that new episodic memories are formed every time a sentence is comprehended, and these memories contribute to lexical processing next time the word is encountered, as well as potentially to the fine-tuning of long-term lexical knowledge.