معرفی
Professor Alissa Melinger serves as Chair of Psycholinguistics in the Department of Psychology at the University of Dundee, part of the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law. She leads the Language Production Lab within Psychology, which forms part of LaRC (the Language Research Centre) dedicated to advancing language research.
Dr. Melinger completed her graduate studies at the Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Following her doctoral work, she held post-doctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands (working with Willem Levelt and Sotaro Kita) and at Saarland University in Germany (working with Matthew Crocker). She joined the University of Dundee in 2006.
Professor Melinger's research integrates linguistic theory, psychological models, and experimental methodology to investigate lexical representations and what speakers know about words. Her work focuses on semantic relations (comparing effects from relationships like dog-horse versus horse-saddle) and sociolinguistic factors such as dialectal lexical variations. She has developed innovative experimental paradigms, including a multiple word variant of the picture-word interference paradigm with Rasha Abdel Rahman. Her recent publications explore topics including AAC usage by children with Down syndrome, semantic processing in non-speaking adults, and the impact of COVID-19 on eye movements in individuals with speech impairments.
Her research portfolio includes five major projects: "To Thine Native Self Be True: Exploring the Dual Bilingual Self Hypothesis" (2024-2027), "Exploring the Self-Reference Effect in a Bilingual Sample," and investigations into variation among BSL users. Professor Melinger teaches courses at multiple levels including Language Processing (Level 2), Language (Level 3), and Gesture, Cognition, and Communication (Level 4 and MSc).
She maintains an active academic presence with recent presentations at conferences including "Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing" (2022, 2023) and specialized talks on dialect representation. Professor Melinger is available for media commentary on her research through Corporate Communications at the University of Dundee, having contributed to media discussions on language selection breakthroughs and distinguishing dialects from languages.
