- 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 include speech perception, phonological processing, the mental lexicon, vocabulary acquisition, connectionist modelling, sleep and memory consolidation.
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.
My interest in sleep and language has led to the development of a sleep laboratory in the Department, which opened in July 2010. Here we can monitor sleep using polysomnography and correlate these recordings with behavioural changes in memory performance. A current interest relates to potential dissociations between sleep spindle activity and slow-wave activity in memory consolidation and integration.
- Language Processing
- Adult Cognition and Neuropsychology
- 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).
- ESRC Research Fellowship
"Neural and behavioural consequences of vocabulary acquisition: an interdisciplinary approach", £272,000 (October 2007 - September 2010).
- Marie Curie Research Training Networks
"Sound to Sense", PI: Sarah Hawkins, Cambridge University (May 2007 - April 2011).
- ESRC Small Grant
Coinvestigator: “Dream content as a measure of memory consolidation across multiple periods of sleep”, ESRC small grant awarded to Blagrove, Lewis, Gaskell & Walker, £80,000 (April-Dec 2012).
- BBSRC Research Grant
Principal investigator: "Levels of processing in spoken word recognition: insights from the dual-task methodology" with Philip Quinlan, £187,000 (Sept 2003 - August 2006).
- MRC Career Establishment Grant
Principal investigator: "Lexical competition in spoken word recognition: the effects of learning new words", £216,000 (March 2001 - March 2007).
- Mark Blagrove
University of Swansea
- Audrey Bürki
University of Geneva
- Anne Castles
- 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
- 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:
- 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.
- Anastasia Roschupkina (Year 3, with Jelena Mirkovic)
- Justyna Soczak (Year 2)
- Jen Ashton (Year 1, with Beth Jefferies)
- 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.
- Henderson, L.M., Weighall, A., Brown, H., & Gaskell, M. G. (2013). On-line lexical competition during spoken word recognition and word learning in children and adults. Child Development, 84, 1668–1685.
- Henderson, L.M., Weighall, A., & Gaskell, M. G.. (2013). Learning new vocabulary in childhood: Effects of semantic training on lexical consolidation and integration. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 116, 572-592.
- Krieger-Redwood, K., Gaskell, M. G., Lindsay, S., & Jefferies, B. (2013). The selective role of premotor cortex in speech perception: A contribution to phoneme judgements but not speech comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12, 2179-2188.
- Lindsay, S. & Gaskell, M. G. (2013). Lexical integration of novel words without sleep. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition,39, 608-622.
- Tamminen, J., & Gaskell, M. G. (2013). Novel word integration in the mental lexicon: Evidence from unmasked and masked semantic priming. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 1001-1025.
See my personal page for a more comprehensive list of downloadable papers.