Very excited to see my first joint venture with Eleanor Heggdal Lønes and Yuki Kamide out in press!! The review will appear in a 2023 volume of Psychology of Learning and Motivation with a special focus on language production, so be sure to check out the other articles as well as they become available, https://www.sciencedirect.com/bookseries/psychology-of-learning-and-motivation/chapters-in-press.

In our review article, which focusses on single word production, we ask whether bidialectalism should be viewed as a special case of bilingualism or whether this conceptualization is insufficient. The review covers a number of psycholinguistic methodologies including picture-word interference and language-switching paradigms, as well as sociolinguistic observations such as dialect leveling and style shifting. We also review evidence regarding strategic and automatic dialectal alignment processes. We conclude the review by proposing a new model of bidialectal production based on our findings and we suggest how to fill the gaps identified in the existing literature and theory.

Until May 30th, you can download the paper from this link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1guXqI8Pewa3c.

The summer was lovely but also busy and I didn’t have time to post about all my activities. So here is a short catch up of the highlights.

In June, I attended the 11th Annual Meeting of the International Workshop on Language Production, in Pittsburgh, USA. This fantastic workshop, the only one of its kind, was the first in-person meeting since 2018, since the 2020 meeting had to be cancelled due to Covid. It was a thrill to see friends and colleagues again and to hear such stimulating and interesting talks. While there, I took part in a panel discussion about the job market in the US and Europe, entitled ‘Cross-continental Academic Lifestyle’ and presented some of my work investigating the distinctions beween langauges and dialects. I’m currently writing these findings up for publication, so stay tuned for a pre-print.

In July, I went to Jena, Germany to give a talk to an audience of psychologists and linguists from the University of Jena. My talk, Choose your words wisely: The role of semantic and sociolinguistic features in lexical selection, included some of the findings also shared in the poster above.

Eleanor Heggdal Lønes recently presented some results from her PhD project at the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference in York, England. Her poster title was ‘Do abstract priming, talker beliefs about the listener, and conceptual pacts all affect lexical choice during cross-dialectal communication?’ Proud supervisors were also in attendance.

You can see the poster here. Below, you can see Eleanor at work!

It was my great honour to deliver a talk to the Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum, a network of psycholinguistics researchers from across Asia, Australia, and beyond. My talk was entitled ‘Choose your words wisely: the role of semantic and sociolinguistic fetures in lexical selection’ and I focussed on my research aiming to use psycholinguistic methods to identify the boundary between dialects and languages. Some of this research has been published, but I also presented some new data hot off the presses.

A recording of my talk is available HERE (password:6diZK.zy).

Thanks to Zhenguang (Garry) Cai for inviting me and Xin Wang for hosting!

Congratulations to Heather Graz for passing her 1st year upgrade viva with flying colours. She can now officially call herself a PhD student! Heather presented her Phd research on investigating the prediction processes of people with SSPI using the Visual Worlds Paradigm to an upgrading panel that included none other than Dr. Yuki Kamide, queen of prediction using VWP. Talk about bravery!!!

Heather absolutely deserved a massive gold star and a glass of wine!

I’m very excited to see this paper in print.

Lin, H.-P., Kuhlen, A. K., Melinger, A., Aristei, S., & Abdel Rahman, R. (2021). Concurrent semantic priming and lexical interference for close semantic relations in Blocked-cyclic picture naming: Electrophysiological signatures. Psychophysiology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/psyp.13990

In a blocked-cyclic picture naming task, we found that only close, but not distant relations, elicited semantic facilitation or interference effects in behavioral and electrophysiological responses. With two functionally-dissociable ERP components, facilitatory N1 and inhibitory P2/N2, we demonstrate that semantic priming and lexical competition happen concurrently during speech production. Our study demonstrates for the first time that semantic priming and lexical competition jointly modulate naming latencies, shifting semantic context effects in the direction of facilitation or interference.

Alissa Melinger was recently interviewed for a story about being tongue tied on the BBC Radio 4 show Sideways. She explained the basic processes involved in speaking and some of the ways the process can be derailed. You can listen to the story here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0011cys

After having been postponed twice due to the pandemic, we are very pleased to announce that the International Workshop on Language Production will hold a short online event in November 2021 on three non-consecutive days. The aim of this event is to continue the engagement established over the last two decades and prime the language production community for the (hopefully) in person meeting in Pittsburgh in 2022! The timing of this short event will be a compromise between European and Pacific time zones, around late afternoon / evening in Europe and early morning Pacific.

The IWoLP (https://language-production.cnrs.fr/) is a venue for multi-disciplinary discussion of cognitive science research on how the brain produces language (psycholinguistics, cognitive neuropsychology, linguistics, computational modeling, and neuroimaging). This online meeting is organized around 5 keynote-style talks, a special session on on-line experimentation and short talks sessions. The submission portal for abstracts will open on August 1 and close on September 15. Further information about how to submit will follow shortly.

 Preliminary program: Invited speakers 

• Eric Lambert (Université de Poitiers): Do motor and rhythmic skills influence the development of written production?
• Tatiana Schnur (Baylor College of Medicine):  Connected speech- Insights from acute stroke 
• Swathi Kiran (Boston University): TBA
• Meredith Tamminga (University of Pennsylvania): Sociolinguistic variation as a window on language production.”
• Michelle Diaz (Pennsylvania State University): Age-related Similarities and Differences in Processing Phonological Information:  Neural and Behavioral Evidence

• Special session on online experiments: Anne Vogt (Humboldt-Universität Berlin), Svetlana Pinet (BCBL), Amie Fairs (Aix-Marseille Université)

The IWoLP website will be updated shortly with further details: https://language-production.cnrs.fr/ 

We look forward to seeing you online in November!The scientific committee 

Xavier Alario (Aix-Marseille), Vic Ferreira (San Diego), Marina Laganaro (Geneva), Alissa Melinger (Dundee), Antje Meyer (Nijmegen), Bonnie Nozari (Pittsburgh)

We are pleased to announce an exciting PhD opportunity in our Speak your Dialect project. The project, entitled ‘Dialects, registers, and accents: investigating the use of sociolinguistic variants’, can be found on the FindAPhD webpage. This aim of this project is to marry the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic sides of language research, by combining cognitive and social psychological methods to investigate both the cognitive mechanisms behind sociolinguistic variant use and the social experiences of speakers of non-standard dialects.

The scope of this project is open and broad, allowing ample opportunity for applicants to bring their own research ideas and to build on their own expertise. Applicants interested in related topics such as language and emotion, language acquisition, and ethnolinguistics are encouraged to get in contact to discuss their ideas. For informal enquiries about the project, contact Dr Alissa Melinger (a.melinger@dundee.ac.uk).

Very excited to see this paper published in Cognition. This paper is a follow up to my 2018 article examining the lexical selection processes involved in dialect word selection. Here, I replicate the between-dialect interference effect previously observed for Scottish and English words but using American and British words, which allowed for a comparision of effects across modalities.