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Dr. Alissa Melinger

Lecturer

Visit the Speech and Gesture Production lab

 

alissamellenger

Contact Details:
Telephone: (+44)(1382) 384610
Email: Alissa Melinger

Postal Address:
School of Psychology
The University of Dundee
Dundee
DD1 4HN
Scotland, UK

 

Biography

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.

 

Research Grouping

Language, Cognition and Perception

 

Research

Language production (focusing both on lexical selection and sentence production)
Gesture production
Morphological processing

 

Research Topics

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.

 

Publications

 
Links
Publications
  Eisner, F., Melinger, A., & Weber, A. (2013). Constraints on the transfer of perceptual learning in accented speech. Frontiers in Cognition. 4:148. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00148
  Melinger, A., & Abdel Rahman, R. (2013). Lexical selection is competitive: Evidence from indirectly activated semantic associates during picture naming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 39(2), 348-364
link Abdel Rahman, R., & Melinger, A. (2011). The dynamic microstructure of speech production: Semantic interference built on the fly. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 37, 149-161.
  Melinger, A., & Cleland, A.A. (2011). Noun phrase structural priming within a sentence: the role of parallel context. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
link Aristei, S., Melinger, A., & Abdel Rahman, R., (2011). Electrophysiological chronometry of semantic context effects in language production. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23 1567-1586. DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2010.21474.
  Janssen, N., Melinger, A., Mahon, B., Finkbeiner, M., & Caramazza, A. (2009). The word class effect in the picture-word interference paradigm. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. First published on: 07 December 2009 (iFirst)
link Abdel Rahman, R., & Melinger, A. (2009). Semantic context effects in language production: A swinging lexical network proposal and a review. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24 (5), 713-734.
link Abdel Rahman, R., & Melinger, A. (2009). Dismissing lexical competition does not make speaking any easier: A rejoinder to Mahon and Caramazza (2009). Language and Cognitive Processes, 24 (5), 749-760.
  Schulte im Walde, S. & Melinger, A. (2008). An in-depth look into the co-occurrence distribution of semantic associates. Journal of Italian Linguistics.Special Issue on From Context to Meaning: Distributional Models of the Lexicon in Linguistics and Cognitive Science.
pdf symbol Abdel Rahman, R. & Melinger, A. (2008). Enhanced phonological facilitation and traces of concurrent word form activation in speech production: An object naming study with multiple distractors. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 1410-1440.
pdf symbol Alario, F.-X., Ayora, P., Costa, A., & Melinger, A. (2008). Grammatical and Non-grammatical contributions to closed-class word selection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 34, 960-981.
  Melinger, A, Pechmann, T., & Pappert, S. (2008). Case in Language Production. In A. Malchukov, & A. Spencer (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Case; Oxford University Press.
  Schulte im Walde, S., Melinger, A., Roth, M., & Weber, A. (2008). An Empirical Characterisation of Response Types in German Association Norms. Research on Language and Computation, 6(2), 205-238.
  Abdel Rahman, R. & Melinger, A. (2007). When bees hamper the production of honey: Lexical interference from associates in speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 33(3), 604-614.
  Melinger, A. & Koenig, J.-P. (2007). Part-of-speech persistence: The influence of part-of-speech information on lexical processes.Journal of Memory and Language., 56, 472–489.
pdf symbol

Melinger, A. & Kita, S. (2007). Conceptual load triggers gesture production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22 (4), 473-500.
  Melinger, A. & Dobel, C. (2005). Lexically-driven syntactic priming. Cognition, 98, B11-B20.
pdf symbol Melinger, A. & Levelt, W. (2004). Gesture and the communicative intention of the speaker. Gesture, 4, 119-141.
  Melinger, A. & Abdel Rahman, R. (2004). Investigating the interplay between semantic and phonological distractor effects in picture naming. Brain and Language, 90, 213-220.
pdf symbol Melinger, A. (2003). Morphological structure in the lexical representation of prefixed words: Evidence from speech errors. Language and Cognitive Processes. 18 (3), 335-362.
  Melinger, A. (2002). Foot Structure and Accent in Seneca. International Journal of American Linguistics, 68, 287-315.
  Mauner, G., Melinger, A., Koenig, J.-P., & Bienvenue, B. (2002) When is schematic participant information encoded: Evidence from eye-monitoring. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 386-406.
  Melinger, A. (2001) The contribution of semantic transparency to the morphological decomposition of prefixed words. Folia Linguistica, 3-4, 285-298.
  Melinger, A. &. Mauner, G. (1999). When are implicit agents encoded? Evidence from cross modal naming. Brain and Language, 68, 185 191.

 

 

Research funding and awards

 

Teaching

Administration:

Additional Information

Collaborations

With Rasha Abdel Rahman, Humboldt University, Berlin, on single word production

With Sandie Cleland, Aberdeen, on sentence production

With Andrea Weber, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands

With Sabine Schulte imWalde, Stuttgart University, Germany, on semantic relations

 

Degrees

MA, PhD (Unversity at Buffalo, State University of New York)

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