摘要睡眠在维持正常发育、神经可塑性和语言发展方面至关重要。有睡眠问题的儿童青少年在记忆和认知功能方面表现更落后之外，还存在明显的语言发展迟缓。研究发现，睡眠时间短可影响儿童青少年的词汇理解、词汇表达以及词汇记忆；睡眠质量差的儿童青少年常表现为语言发展落后，但缺乏统一的睡眠和语言评估工具，目前尚未得出一致结论；白天小睡有助于巩固婴幼儿的词汇学习，并且与儿童青少年词汇记忆和泛化有关；睡眠相关呼吸障碍患儿表现出较差的接受性语言理解能力和较低的词汇水平，随着年龄的增长，其语言障碍程度越严重；此外，睡眠促进神经发育障碍儿童的语言学习。睡眠与语言发展的神经机制尚未明确，可能的机制为睡眠问题影响额叶、海马的信息处理，干扰神经突触可塑性，损害包括记忆功能、注意力、执行功能、听觉处理功能等，最终影响到语言发展。未来仍需要更多相关研究阐明其中的关联和机制，有助于为语言发育落后或者合并神经发育障碍儿童提供一条提高语言能力的途径。

abstractsSleep takes an important role in maintaining typical development, neural plasticity, and language development. Not only poorer performance in memory and cognitive functions, but also obvious delayed language development are seen in children and adolescents with sleep problem. Previous research found that sleep duration affects children and adolescents' ability in comprehensive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, and vocabulary retention. Children and adolescents with poor sleep quality usually show language developmental delay, however, there is no integrated evaluation tool for sleep and language, and a consistent conclusion is therefore not reached. Daytime naps are beneficial to consolidate vocabulary learning in infants, and it’s also relevant to vocabulary retention and generalization in children and adolescents. Children with sleep related breathing disorders show lower ability in receptive language comprehension and lower lexical level, and with the increase of their age, the severity of their language disorder becomes higher. Besides, sleep can promote language learning in children with neuro-developmental disorder.The neuro-physiological mechanism underlying sleep and language remains unknown, and one of the possible explanations is that sleep problem harms the information processing in frontal lobe and hippocampus, and interferes with neural plasticity. The injury includes memory, attention, executive function, auditory processing, and so on, and finally language development is damaged. Further research is necessary to clarify the relation and mechanism between these two elements, this will be helpful in finding out an effective way to promote language function in children with language retardation and/or combined with neuro-developmental disorder.