Dr Nicolas Dumay

About me:

I am an experimental psychologist working at the boundary between memory and language. My research initially focused on spoken word access processes in speech perception, with a doctoral work looking at the nature of acoustical markers of word boundaries and how these modulate the access to word memories. My research interests, however, have progressively moved towards language and memory consolidation. My research effort focuses on the dynamic changes that occur in memory and how these affect how we acquire, perceive, produce or forget linguistic information. I seem to have made an influential contribution through my collaboration with Gareth Gaskell (University of York). We showed that memory consolidation, especially during sleep, plays a major role in word acquisition. Our findings have opened up a new line of investigation, and, as a result, I find myself at a very exciting location on the research map, at a crosstalk between language and memory, sleep research and the neurobiology of learning.

I welcome student applications to work with me on these issues, at any level of the cursus, from second-year internship to PhD.

Area of expertise:

• Memory consolidation
• Language plasticity
• Sleep
• Spoken word access and segmentation processes
• Emotion

Interests:

My research effort focuses on the offline changes that occur in memory and how these affect how we acquire, perceive, produce or forget linguistic (but also other types of) information. This means that I study memory consolidation as an object of investigation, but also use it to by-pass the influence of item idiosyncrasies when testing psycholinguistic hypotheses.

Qualifications:

Postgraduate Certificate for Higher Education (University of Kent, 2010)

Doctorate in Psychological and Educational Sciences (Universite libre de Bruxelles, 2006)

Career:

I am honorary Staff Scientist at the Basque Center for Cognition, Brain and Language, Spain.

I am Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and Fellow of the Psychonomic Society.

I am also on the editorial boards of the following journals:

- Psychological Science

- Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition