A recent study found that sleeping eight hours can have linguistic benefits and help adults speak a new language.

It is said that when we sleep, the brain integrates all the information learned during the day with previous knowledge in order to archive it for long-term storage.

University of South Australia researchers monitored the brain activity of 35 English-speaking adults as they learned “mini pinyin”, a miniature language used to study language learning and progressive sentence processing . The language has grammatical rules similar to those of English.

In the study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, half of the participants learned “mini pinyin” in the morning and returned later in the evening to have their memory tested.

The other half learned the miniature language in the evening, then spent the night in the lab while their brain activity was recorded. The progress of the research was tested in the morning.

It was found that those who slept performed better than those who stayed awake before having their memory tested.

“We found that sleep relative to wakefulness was associated with superior performance for rules that followed a sequence-based word order,” the authors wrote.

Lead researcher Zachariah Cross, a PhD from the University of South Australia, told media that sleep-driven memory improvements were linked to the linking of slow oscillations and sleep spindles, which are brain wave patterns that synchronize during the non-REM phase of sleep.

While explaining the non-REM phase, Cross said non-rapid eye movement (REM) is the restorative phase of sleep when the eyes stop moving and during which muscles relax and brain activity, breathing and rate heart rate slows down.

“This coupling (binding) likely reflects the transfer of learned information from the hippocampus to the cortex, thereby enhancing long-term memory storage,” Cross said.

According to the researchers, the findings could potentially inform treatments for people with language disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and aphasia, who experience greater sleep disturbances than other adults.

Increasing slow oscillations could speed up aphasia-based speech therapy, Cross said.