Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Turkish Studies
Areas of Interest
- Comprehension, production, and mental representation of language
- Morphosyntactic processing in speakers of Turkish
- Bi-/multilingual sentence processing
- Cognitive science of language
- Structural priming
Biography
I am a psycholinguist interested in the question of how language is represented in the humanmind and how it is processed during both comprehension and production. My research primarily consists of sentence comprehension and production experiments with various mono-, bi- andmultilingual populations speaking various languages with a special emphasis on Turkish. I use a variety of experimental methods including eye-tracking, self-paced reading, and web-based tasks to study different linguistic phenomena, focusing mainly on aspects of Turkish morphosyntax. I have worked extensively within the structural priming paradigm. I am particularly interested in the processing and acquisition/learning of Turkish as a second, foreignor heritagelanguage. I focus both on the linguistic and psychological factors involved in the acquisition of Turkish as a foreign language. I am currently teaching introductory, intermediate, and advanced level Turkish courses at U of T. My research, specifically with learners of Turkish as a foreign language complements my teaching. My current research involves the comparative investigation of sentence processing in Turkish by Turkish-English (and Turkish-French) bi-/multilinguals including foreign language learners, heritage speakers and attritersin North America (mainly in Canada) and Europe.
Education
Publications
- Review of the book Current Approaches to Syntax: A Comparative Handbook, edited by A. Kertész, E. Moravcsik, & C. Rákosi (2019) (Indiana University, Bloomington : 2020)
- Structural priming in the production of Turkish possessive noun phrases and noun clauses (Springer : 2019)
- The production of passives by English-Norwegian and Turkish-Norwegian bilinguals: a preliminary investigation using a cross-linguistic structural priming manipulation (Springer : 2019)
- The acquisition of Turkish (genitive)-possessive structures by adult Norwegian learners (John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam : 2019)
- Structural priming in L2 Turkish: A study on possessive noun phrases and noun clauses (John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam : 2016)
- Yapısal hazırlama ve karşılıklı konuşmada sözdizimsel uyumun incelenmesi (Structural priming and the investigation of syntactic alignment in conversation) (İstanbul Kültür University, İstanbul : 2013)
- Türkçedeki ilgi-iyelik yapılarında yapısal hazırlama (Structural priming of genitive-possessive constructions in Turkish) (University of Szeged, Department of Altaic Studies, Szeged (Hungary) : 2012)
- Structural priming and the phrasal/clausal distinction: The case of CQs. (ISCA and the University of Athens : 2011)
- Semantic priming at the sentence level with the connective 'because' (ISCA and the University of Athens : 2011)