Melinda Fricke

Melinda Fricke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh, affiliated with the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences. Her research focuses on psycholinguistics, bilingualism, and speech production/perception, with a particular emphasis on codeswitching and phonetic variation. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught courses including LING 1000 and advanced phonetics/phonology modules.

Her work employs experimental and corpus methods to explore how bilingual speakers plan and process speech. Current projects include NSF-funded research on computational models of bilingual speech and the psycholinguistic origins of sound change. She is also involved in training machine learning models using bilingual corpora.

Publications span topics like cross-language activation, predictive processing in bilingual word recognition, and the functional basis of lenition phenomena. Fricke is on parental leave until January 2026. She advises the PhD admissions process and collaborates with researchers like Yulia Tsvetkov and Shuly Wintner.