Sandie Cleland

Sandie Cleland is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Aberdeen, where she has been employed since 2006 and promoted to her current rank in 2013. A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, she actively supervises PhD students and contributes to the department's research profile in cognitive sciences.

Her academic journey includes an MA from the University of Glasgow (1998) and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (2002), supervised by Professor Martin Pickering and Professor Holly Branigan. Post-PhD, she held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Edinburgh followed by a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of York (2003-2006) working with Professor Gareth Gaskell and Dr Philip Quinlan.

Dr Cleland's research spans psycholinguistics and numerical cognition, investigating how language production interacts with attentional mechanisms and spatial-numerical associations. Current projects examine idiomatic language production (with Dr Emily Nordmann), bilingual language processing (with Jennifer Mattschey), and number-space relationships (with Dr Rebecca Bull). Her work frequently explores polysemy effects, syntactic priming, and the cognitive architecture underlying fixed expressions.

Analysis of her 20+ publications reveals a dual trajectory: sustained contributions to psycholinguistics (particularly lexical ambiguity and syntactic representation) alongside growing focus on numerical cognition since 2012, with recent work emphasizing spatial-numerical interactions and methodological innovations in SNARC effect research.

Her scientific recognition includes:

• Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

She has successfully supervised PhD students including Dr Emily Nordmann, Dr Bernadet Jager, and Dr Tom Mitchell. Key collaborations extend to Dr Rebecca Bull (National Institute of Education, Singapore) and Dr Alissa Melinger (University of Dundee), supported by grants including her ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her teaching encompasses Level 2 Language & Cognition, Level 4 Advanced Topics in Language, and MRes funding application training.

Within Aberdeen's School of Psychology, she contributes to the Cognitive Psychology research group, advancing experimental work on language-numerical cognition interfaces through laboratory-based behavioral studies.