Gareth Gaskell
Professor

Profile

Biography

• University of Cambridge
  BA in Experimental Psychology
• University of London
  PhD in Psycholinguistics

Read Experimental Psychology at Cambridge, and then studied for a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics at Birkbeck College, London. Continued postdoctoral research on language at Birkbeck, before joining the scientific staff at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. Moved to the Psychology Department in York in 1999. Current research interests focus on the intersection between psycholinguistics, sleep and memory consolidation. For example, I am interested in how we learn, retain, consolidate and or forget words.

Departmental roles

• Deputy Head of Department - Professional & Personal Development

Research

Overview

I have two overlapping areas of research: psycholinguistics and sleep/memory research.

On the psycholinguistic side, recent research has looked at the representations and processes involved in the perception of spoken words. One important question in this domain addresses how listeners cope with the wide range of variation in the surface form of speech. I have been exploring the perceptual effects of a common source of these changes, phonological variation, which can neutralise phonemic distinctions in connected speech.

Another strand of research has examined issues of activation and competition between lexical candidates during the course of a word's perception. This research has led to the development of a connectionist model of speech perception based on the distributed representation of various types of lexical knowledge.

My interest in sleep and memory began when working on the factors involved in the development of lexical representations. The basic question here is how does a new word enter the mental lexicon and join in the competitive process of spoken word recognition. It seems that this lexicalisation process is associated with sleep.

I am Head of the Sleep, Language and Memory Laboratory in the Department, which gained new purpose-built facilities in January 2017. Here we can monitor sleep using polysomnography and correlate these recordings with behavioural changes in memory performance. A current interest relates to individual differences in the timecourse and process of consolidation of language.

Research group(s)

• Language Processing
• Adult Cognition and Neuropsychology

Grants

Current Grants

• Jan 2016-Dec 2019     Joint Principal Investigator: Memory consolidation in typical and atypical development. ESRC Research Grant awarded to Henderson, Gaskell & Norbury. £1,019,000.
• Jan 2015-Dec 2018     Coinvestigator. “How do children learn and consolidate new written words?” ARC Discovery grant awarded to Castles, Nation and Gaskell. A$661,200.

Recent Grants

• ESRC Research Grant
  Principal Investigator: “Reactivation of declarative memory during sleep”, £302,000 (May 2012-April 2015).
• ESRC Research Grant
  Coinvestigator: “The role of learning mechanisms in understanding language”. Awarded to Rodd, Gaskell & Davis. £386,000 (Mar 2014-Feb 2017).
• ESRC Research Grant
  Principal Investigator: “Systematicity and consistency in the consolidation of word knowledge” with Jelena Mirkovic, £310,000 (Oct 2011-Sept 2014).
• Leverhulme Trust
  Principal Investigator: “Novel word integration in adults and children” with Anna Weighall, £159,000 (Aug 2010-July 2014).
• Waterloo Foundation
  Coinvestigator: “Dyslexia, sleep and co-occurrence.” Awarded to Henderson, Gaskell, Warmington and Weighall. £49,822 (Mar 2014-Apr 2015).

Collaborators

• Mark Blagrove
  University of Swansea
• Audrey Bürki
  University of Geneva
• Anne Castles
  Macquarie University
  
• Matt Davis
  MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
• Nicolas Dumay
  University of Exeter
• Penny Lewis
  University of Manchester
• Shane Lindsay
  University of Dundee
• Kate Nation
  University of Oxford
  
• Ken Paller
  Northwestern University
• Elsa Spinelli
  University of Grenoble
• Jakke Tamminen
  Royal Holloway, University of London
• Matt Walker
  University of California, Berkeley
• Anna Weighall
  Sheffield Hallam University
• Pienie Zwitserlood
  University of Muenster

Available PhD research projects

I am happy to take on PhD students in the following areas:

• Psycholinguistics
• Sleep and memory consolidation

Questions that current PhD students are addressing include:

• How do we learn new words?
• What kind of representation do spoken words have in the mental lexicon?
• What does sleep do to the representations of new memories?
• How does memory consolidation relate to brain activity during sleep?

Potential PhD applicants can contact me to discuss these and other possibilities.

Supervision

• Emma James (Year 3, with Lisa Henderson)
• Bardur Joensen (Year 2, with Aidan Horner)
• Amanda Olson (Year 1, with Lisa Henderson)

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Development and Language Teaching Blocks 5 & 6 (Years 1-2)

• Cognitive Psychology of Sleep (Year 3)

Publications

Selected publications

• Cai, Z. G, Gilbert, R. A., Davis, M. H., Gaskell, M. G., Farrar, L., Adler, S., & Rodd, J. M. (2017). Accent modulates access to word meaning: Evidence for a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 98, 73-101.
• Gaskell, M. G. (2017). A brave new world of sleep? The Psychologist, 30, 22-27.
• James, E., Gaskell, M. G., Weighall, A., & Henderson, L. (2017). Consolidation of vocabulary during sleep: The rich get richer? Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 77, 1-13.
• Weighall, A. R., Henderson, L. M., Barr, D. J., Cairney, S. A., & Gaskell, M. G. (2017). Eye-tracking the time‐course of novel word learning and lexical competition in adults and children. Brain and Language, 167, 13-27.
• Cairney, S. A., Lindsay, S., Sobczak, J. M., Paller, K. A., & Gaskell, M. G. (2016). The benefits of targeted memory reactivation for consolidation in sleep are contingent on memory accuracy and direct cue-memory associations. Sleep, 39, 1139–1150.
• Tham, E. K. H., Lindsay, S., & Gaskell, M. G. (2015). Markers of automaticity in sleep-associated consolidation of novel words. Neuropsychologia, 71, 146-157.
• Gaskell, M. G., Warker, J., Lindsay, S., Frost, R., Guest, J., Snowdon, R. & Stackhouse, A. (2014). Sleep underpins the plasticity of language production. Psychological Science, 25, 1457-1465.

Full publications list

See Google Scholar or the York Research Database for a more comprehensive list of downloadable papers.

External activities

Memberships

• Experimental Psychology Society
• Psychonomic Society
• Behavioral and Brain Sciences Associate
• European Sleep Research Society
  

Editorial duties

• Journal of Memory and Language 
  Associate Editor
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
  Consulting Editor
• Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
  Editorial Board