Lab Members
Last Updated:
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Duygu Sarısoy, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics Principle Investigator |
Duygu Özge is a faculty member at the Department of Foreign Language Education at the Middle East Technical University. She is the director of the METU Language and Cognitive Development Lab. Assoc. Prof. Özge received her M.Sc. degree from METU Cognitive Science Program in 2004 and her Ph.D. degree from METU English Language Teaching Program in 2010. During her Ph.D. between 2007 and 2009, she worked as a research assistant at the Department of Psychology at the University of Reading in the UK. Between 2010 and 2013, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Koç University and at the Collaborative Research Center at the University of Stuttgart, and she worked as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Lab for Developmental Studies at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University between 2013 and 2015. Her research areas include language and cognitive development, development of language processing mechanism from childhood into adulthood, language and cognitive development in underrepresented populations, and childhood bilingualism. |
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Fatma Nur Öztürk Saçkan, Ph.D. Student Lab Manager |
I received my Bachelor's degree from the Foreign Language Education Department at METU, with a minor in Psychology. I then pursued graduate studies in both Cognitive Science and English Language Teaching at the same university. Currently, I am a Ph.D. student and a research assistant in the English Language Teaching program at METU. My research interests lie at the intersection of psycholinguistics, experimental semantics, and pragmatics. My recent work focuses on the disambiguation of scopally ambiguous quantification, examining the roles of syntactic and prosodic cues in this process. I also investigate how perspective-taking abilities contribute to the recognition of communicative intentions, and how deficits in theory of mind influence figurative language processing. I am currently conducting a study on the role of priming in the acquisition of epistemic modality. |
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Asuman Şimşek Tontuş, Ph.D. Candidate |
I am a Research Assistant and PhD candidate in the Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University. I hold an MA in English Language Teaching, where my research focused on the functional aspects and organizational patterns of co-speech gestures and their role in facilitating effective interaction in L2 classroom settings. In my PhD, I continue to explore the effects of perceptual input and how affordances guide object salience in verbal and gestural outputs, contributing to our understanding of cognitive mechanisms underlying multimodal language production across development. |
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Ayşe Gül Özay Demircioğlu, Ph.D. Candidate |
I graduated from the Foreign Language Education (FLE) program at Middle East Technical University (METU) in 2017 and completed my MA in English Language Teaching (ELT) at METU in 2020. I am currently pursuing my Ph.D. in ELT at the same institution. Focusing on the acquisition of presupposition in Turkish-speaking children, I have completed my coursework and am currently working on my dissertation. I am an active member of the Language and Cognitive Development Lab at METU and have contributed to several research projects. My research interests include the Semantics-Pragmatics interface and early language acquisition. Previously, I worked as a lecturer at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara from 2017 to 2019, and as a teaching and research assistant at TED University between 2019 and 2021. Since 2022, I have been working as a lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages at Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University. |
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Galiya Saraç, Ph.D. Candidate |
I am a Ph.D. student in the English Language Teaching program at METU and hold an M.A. in ELT from Gazi University. My research interests include implicit causality biases and ambiguous pronoun nresolution in psychological state events. |
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Hilal Yıldırım, Ph.D. Candidate |
I graduated from the Middle East Technical University (METU) Department of Foreign Language Education with a BA degree and a minor in Psychology. Subsequently, I earned my MA degree in Linguistics from Boğaziçi University. During my MA studies, I also gained professional experience as a linguist for a Natural Language Processing project for Google. Currently, I am a PhD candidate in the English Language Teaching program at METU, specializing in the language studies track. My doctoral research focuses on lexical semantics in Turkish, specifically investigating whether sentences with aspectual coercion pose processing difficulty for adult Turkish speakers. Alongside my doctoral studies, I work as an instructor at METU Department of Modern Languages. |
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Işın Tekin, Ph.D. Candidate |
I completed my BA and MA degrees in Linguistics at Ankara University. My previous work includes corpus-based studies of figurative language, and metonymy processing using self-paced reading paradigms. Currently, I'm a PhD candidate investigating how linguistic context shapes children's understanding of metaphor. I use eye-tracking and other behavioural methods to understand how children integrate contextual cues when interpreting metaphors in real time. Alongside my main research, I also assist with data analysis on related projects within the lab. |
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Enes Us, MA Student |
I have a bachelor's degree from Middle East Technical University in the Foreign Language Education Department and a minor in Psychology. Currently, I am pursuing my MA in the English Language Teaching Department. My research interests lie in the field of experimental semantics and syntax. |
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Onur Evcen, MA Student |
I received my bachelor's degree from the Department of Foreign Language Education at METU. I am currently pursuing a master's degree in the English Language Teaching program at the same university. My academic interests lie in psycholinguistics and the semantics-pragmatics interface. My research focuses on the development of possibility representations in children. |
