Gareth Gaskell
University of York

Gareth Gaskell

University of York
United Kingdom

Sleep to improve your language

Throughout our lives as language users we need to adapt to new linguistic circumstances and refine our accumulated knowledge. In this talk I will discuss the role that sleep plays in this plasticity. I will describe several situations in which new language learning becomes better integrated with existing knowledge following a period of sleep. For example, when we encounter an unfamiliar word, its ability to engage in lexical processing is strengthened by sleep. In particular, new words are better able to influence the speed of recognition of their existing neighbours after sleep (enhanced lexical competition). Similarly, the acquisition of new phonotactic constraints in speech production show a stronger influence on speech errors after sleep. So far as we know, this profile of learning operates through development and adulthood, and applies to both first and second language acquisition.

I will discuss how a complementary systems model applied to sleep can accommodate these findings. Key components of this model support the rapid episodic encoding of new linguistic material via the hippocampus, plus a more stable long-term repository of language knowledge in cortical regions. Sleep provides one means by which dialogue between these components can update more crystallised knowledge, with specific aspects of sleep (sleep spindles and slow oscillations) implicated in the process.

Although this model applies most obviously to situations where we have something novel to learn, such as an unfamiliar word, recent evidence is emerging that the model applies more broadly. Even when linguistic materials are fully familiar there is learning to be done, in terms of updating our semantic knowledge associated with words and keeping track of conversations and texts. Therefore, I will also describe recent evidence suggesting that the same encoding/consolidation system can operate to support plasticity and learning in these domains.

Biography

Gareth Gaskell studied Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University, before moving on to a Ph.D. in Psycholinguistics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He continued as a postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck, before joining the scientific staff at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. Gareth moved to the Psychology Department in York in 1999 and is now a Professor of Psychology. He has strong interests in psycholinguistics, cognition, language development, developmental disorders, memory and sleep, and he set up the Sleep, Language and Memory (SLAM) lab at York. He has served as action editor for several journals including Language and Cognitive Processes and Journal of Memory and Language, and he is currently a grant assessment panel member for the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He has published roughly 200 articles related to psycholinguistics, and has edited the Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics (now in its second edition).