I am a researcher interested in the psychology of language and experimental psycholinguistics. My main area of research is therefore at the intersection of cognitive psychology and theoretical linguistics. I am interested in the question of how people produce and comprehend their native language. I carry out behavioral experiments using different methods including reaction times and eye-tracking. My focus is on (morpho-)syntactic processing in adult native speakers of Turkish and English, with a specific emphasis on structural priming.

I also work as an instructor at two different programs representing the two aspects of my research area, namely at the Psychology Department of Bilkent University (http://catalog.bilkent.edu.tr/current/instructor/i9802.html, and http://www.psy.bilkent.edu.tr/) and the English Linguistics Department of Hacettepe University (http://www.idb.hacettepe.edu.tr/eng/engindex.html).

I received my PhD at the Cognitive Science Program in Middle East Technical University (http://www.ii.metu.edu.tr/academic_program/cognitive-science) in September 2012. The title of my dissertation is: "Structural Priming in Turkish Genitive-Possessive Constructions).

I worked as a visiting researcher at the Polinsky Language Sciences Lab of Harvard University (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~herpro/site/Home.html) during the 2009-2010 academic year.

I am also interested in early language development, especially in how young infants achieve word segmentation and the subsequent word-object associations. I have also been affiliated with METU Baby Lab (http://bebem.ii.metu.edu.tr/) since 2006 and am still a member of an ongoing TUBITAK Project on Turkish Infants' Early Sensitivity to Vowel Harmony and Word Stress.