Sleep, Lexicon, and Morphosyntax in L2 Spanish Acquisition

Research indicates that, internationally, students are not sleeping enough, and North American students were reported to sleep the least (Gradisar, Gardner & Dohnt, 2011). The sleep foundation advises that young adults (18-25 years old) get seven to nine hours of sleep per night for proper healthy functioning (Suni, 2022). However, studies show that over half of college students get less than seven hours of sleep per night (Harvard, 2021). Additionally, the percentage of adults who reported to have short sleep duration (less than seven hours of sleep per 24-hours) were the highest in the southeastern U.S. in states like Ohio and Michigan (CDC, 2022). The lack of proper sleep is especially concerning among the population of university students in foreign language courses as existing research points to a relationship between sleep quantity and second language learning outcomes (e.g., Koninck et al. 1990; Sicard & de Bot 2013; MacDonald 2015; Kim & Fenn 2020). The present study is the first to look at this in Spanish L2, and at the specific subdomains of morphosyntax and lexicon. Additionally, past research on sleep and L2 languages has utilized either highly-labor intensive measures for sleep, e.g., electroencephalography (e.g., De Koninck et al. 1989), or very simplistic ones, e.g., simply asking how many hours a student had slept the previous night (e.g., MacDonald 2015.) In contrast, this study utilizes the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index -a measure widely used in sleep research- to examine the relationship between sleep quantity and quality with executive function (Buysse et al., 1988).No embargoAcademic Major: Psycholog