Sleep Deprivation

Reciting a poem from memory

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Subjects were asked to remember a short poem, and afterwards asked to record it onto tape. The tape was subsequently judged by 2 or 3 judges. This procedure was carried out at lunchtime before sleep deprivation, and at lunchtime the following day.

Judgements were made on the number of intonation, errors, pauses and mis-pronunciations. The time taken to recite the poem was also recorded.

The bar chart above shows the median pronunciation errors. The median before sleep deprivation was 0.5, and was 1.5 after sleep deprivation. Using a Wilcoxon T test, T=7 and N=13. this means the result is significant at the 0.01 level, one tailed (less than 1 in 100 chance of the result being a fluke).>

Listen to these two samples of sleep deprived subjects speaking.
Sample 1 .

As can be seen from the bar chart above, there was a slight drop in intonation, after sleep deprivation, for both poems. The recordings of the subjects were judged for the amount of expression in their recitation on a scale of 1 to 10. The 'grizzley' poem had a median rating of 5 before and 4 after. The 'LSD' poem had a median rating of 4 before and 3.5 after. These differences are not significant.

The bar chart above shows the median times taken to recite the poems. The average before was 6.705 seconds and 7.2 seconds after sleep deprivation. These differences were not significant.

As can be seen from the above bar chart, there were few pauses and errors in reciting the poem.

Research conducted by Lizanne Kao and Aaron Thurlow

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Gary Sturt
sturtg@colchsfc.ac.uk