In the first months of life, infants are able to grasp relations between objects and co-occurring words. During this rich period of learning, does sleep help to strengthen object-word relationships? A recent study from researchers in Germany investigated this relationship in infants aged 6 to 8 months. They exposed infants to new object-word pairings and then measured their brain activity after the infants had taken a nap. The study found that sleep was indeed associated with semantic encoding of words in long-term memory. This was especially true during longer periods of stage 2 sleep, indicating length of a nap can play a significant role in infant learning. Researchers additionally found brain patterns known to occur in children and adults that improve memory during sleep, also occur in infants. An infant’s sleep provides the brain an opportunity to categorize and filter what they have been exposed to, enabling further development.