Projects per year
Personal profile
Biography
Check out my lab webpage here
I am a graduate of the Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. My dissertation was an experimental study of the representation of morphological information in the mental lexicon. After completing my degree, I took up a three year post-doctoral position working with Willem Levelt, from the Production Group, and Sotaro Kita, in the Gesture Project, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. I also spent three years as a Post-doctoral researcher and lecturer in Psycholinguistics at Saarland University in Germany working with Matthew Crocker. I joined the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee in 2006.
Research
My research combines linguistic theory, psychological models, and experimental methodology into a line of research that investigates what speakers know about words. Specifically, I conduct research on the nature and organization of lexical representations, focusing more recently grammatical features in speech production (e.g., subcategorization frames, mass/count features, case features, etc) and the nature of different types of semantic relations (e.g., a comparison of effects arising from the relationship between dog and horse and the relationship between horse and saddle). I've developed novel variants of well-known experimental paradigms such as picture-word interference and syntactic priming to investigate lexical representations and processes. I developed a single word variant of traditional syntactic priming paradigms to investigate the mechanisms underlying word order priming effects. Rasha Abdel Rahman and I also developed a multiple word variant of picture-word interference paradigm to investigate the relationships between different types of distractor effects.
Teaching
Individual Differences and Personality (Level 1)
Language (Level 3)
Gesture, Cognition, and Communication (Level 4 and Msc)
Fingerprint Fingerprint is based on mining the text of the person's scientific documents to create an index of weighted terms, which defines the key subjects of each individual researcher.
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Projects 2014 2021
The Development of Idiom Comprehension Processes in Children: Developing an Online Methodology
1/02/16 → 31/01/17
Project: Research
Research Output 2005 2019
To re-tune or not to re-tune: Comments on the flexible criterion
Melinger, A. & Abdel Rahman, R., 6 Jan 2019Research output: Contribution to journal › Comment/debate
Distinguishing languages from dialects: A litmus test using the picture-word interference task
Melinger, A., Mar 2018, In : Cognition. 172, p. 73-83 11 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
The closer they are, the more they interfere: Semantic similarity of word distractors increases competition in language production
Rose, S. B., Aristei, S., Melinger, A. & Abdel Rahman, R., 5 Jul 2018, In : Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Bilingual advantage, bidialectal advantage or neither? Comparing performance across three tests of executive function in middle childhood
Ross, J. & Melinger, A., Jul 2017, In : Developmental Science. 20, 4, p. 1-21 21 p., e12405.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Semantic Organization Preferences of AAC Users
Lyons, J., Melinger, A. & Waller, A., 12 Sep 2017, p. 52. 1 p.Research output: Contribution to conference › Abstract
Activities 2017 2017
Women in Science
Alissa Melinger (Speaker), Josephine Ross (Speaker), Mariel Symeonidou (Speaker), Yaroslava Goncharova (Speaker)Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Festival/Exhibition
Institue of Social Sciences Research Launch
Alissa Melinger (Organiser)Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Press / Media
Dundee University researchers breakthrough in language selection
1/02/18
1 item of media coverage
Press/Media: Research
Thesis
Gaze cues and language in communication
Author: MacDonald, R. G., 2014Supervisor: Tatler, B. (Supervisor), Hopkins, N. (Supervisor), Melinger, A. (Supervisor) & Murray, W. (Supervisor)
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy
Word representations of bilingual adults and children
Author: Terzopoulos, A., 2018Supervisor: Duncan, L. G. (Supervisor) & Melinger, A. (Supervisor)
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy