Slow and steady wins the race? Consolidating new vocabulary in childhood and adulthood

It is widely believed that children excel at language learning, yet adults consistently outperform children in the lab. This talk will present a series of studies to show that while adults encode novel words very rapidly, children show greater gains in memory performance by later tests. These findings will be interpreted within a complementary learning systems framework (Davis & Gaskell, 2009; McClelland et al., 2020), which distinguishes between rapid hippocampal-based encoding processes and slower consolidation into long-term knowledge. I will consider the proposal that prior knowledge and sleep-associated mechanisms differentially support consolidation at different stages of development, and discuss how this shift could account for language learning differences from childhood to adulthood.