Last Update: 2 Nov 2024

I joined the University of Warwick's Psychology Department as an Assistant Professor in the Language and Learning Group in March 2024.

Research

I am an experimental psycholinguist by training, with an interest in the interface between language and declarative memory. Specifically, I am interested in how words are learnt, represented, processed, and forgotten in neurotypical adults. I also have an interest in the role of sleep in language comprehension and false memory formation. My research to date primarily uses the study-test paradigm, where participants learn/read something in the study phase and I measure their learning subsequently in the test phase. The test phase may take place immediately after the study phase or after a significant delay, which may include a period of sleep. Recently, I have begun to incorporate more computational methods to complement my research, where I use corpus linguistics/NLP methods to inform psycholinguistic/learning theories.

Finally, I am an avid supporter of open/reproducible science and am a member of multiple consortia (e.g., ChiPer, SPAM-L). I pre-register all my studies and recently completed my first registered report—a format that I am keen to adopt more often. I code primarily in R, but also in Python.

Teaching

I am the convener for the 2nd-year undergraduate module PS210: Language & Cognition. I also contribute to the History section of PS122: Psychology in Context.

Education/Training

I completed my DPhil/PhD in Experimental Psychology under the supervision of Professor Kate Nation at the University of Oxford (2021). Before that, I completed my MPhil in Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge (2017) and my BA in Linguistics/English at the University of Hong Kong (2016).

From 2020-2023, I held a postdoc position at the University of York, where I led an ESRC-funded project on the influence of sleep/episodic memory in language comprehension (PI: Professor Gareth Gaskell). Before that, I held a part-time postdoctoral position at Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government in 2020-2021.

Joining the team

I am happy to host undergraduate/postgraduate interns who wish to gain more experience or expand their network for short periods. I may have funds to sponsor this kind of visit.

For prospective PhD/Master students, I am happy to supervise projects that fall in the domains of language and memory. I am also happy to supervise projects that use computational methods to inform psycholinguistics/memory theories.

Please reach out to me at firstname.lastname@warwick.ac.uk, ideally with your CV.

Follow me on X @matthewmakpsy