Emma James's research while affiliated with University of Oxford and other places

... Future research should seek to establish the number of exposures needed for an effect of diversity to emerge and investigate the long-term effects of contextual diversity on new word learning by spacing learning over multiple sessions. Studies should also consider potential effects of overnight sleep, which may differ for words learned in high versus low diversity conditions (James et al., 2020). ...

... Studies that have revealed clear sleep-related effects in the language domain tended to use novel linguistic materials; for instance, some word-learning studies trained participants on pseudowords such as cathedruke and feckton (e.g., Dumay & Gaskell, 2007;Henderson et al., 2021;Henderson & James, 2018;Takashima et al., 2014;Tamminen & Gaskell, 2013;Wang et al., 2017). As such, it is possible that stimulus novelty is a main factor that underlies the benefits of sleep-related processes. ...

... This limited research on individual differences in consolidation focuses on schoolage children. In a notable exception, Henderson et al. (2021) assessed 5-to 7-year-old children's memory for words learned from a storybook when tested immediately and after a period of overnight sleep. Knowledge of the form-referent link was more strongly related to vocabulary knowledge after sleep than before, suggesting better consolidation for children with better vocabulary knowledge. ...

... While this may deviate to some extent from how events are "naturally" experienced, it allows to manipulate the associative structure of an event presentation (see Horner et al., 2015). Dependency in a separated encoding condition was not reduced compared with simultaneous encoding (but see James et al., 2020, for boundary conditions). However, this was only the case when all events were presented in a closed-loop (CL) structure in which all pairwise associations are shown (i.e., all possible pairings of event elements), but not in an open-loop structure in which the presentation of one pairwise association is excluded such that, for example, David Cameronbicycle is not presented (Horner & Burgess, 2014;Horner et al., 2015; see also Joensen et al., 2020). ...

... words that differ by a single sound) are more readily learned than words with fewer phonological neighbours. This benefit has been found for pre-school children (Hoover et al., 2010;Storkel, 2009;Storkel et al., 2013), schoolaged children (James et al., 2019;van der Kleij et al., 2016), and adults (James et al., 2019;Storkel et al., 2006), suggesting that individuals can access prior knowledge to support learning across the lifespan (although note that this support may be less apparent in incidental word learning; James et al., 2020b). From a complementary learning systems perspective, James et al. (2019) found that this early benefit from phonological neighbours was reduced one week later, once words with fewer neighbours had opportunities to benefit from offline consolidation processes. ...

... A burgeoning body of evidence suggests that sleep influences language learning. Studies of infants (Friedrich et al., 2017;Horváth et al., 2015), children (James et al., 2020;Williams & Horst, 2014) and adults (Bakker, et al., 2014;Dumay & Gaskell, 2007;Wang et al., 2017) have converged to show that a period of post-exposure sleep (vs. an equivalent amount of wakefulness) often benefits the retention of newly acquired linguistic knowledge. ...