Hello!

I recently defended my PhD dissertation in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Starting this fall, I will be joining the University of Michigan as a postdoctoral research fellow working with Jon Brennan!

I am a psycholinguist, specializing on how people understand language in real-time. I am also interested in investigating how they do so using computational models.

Before coming to UMass, I got my BA and MA from the Foreign Language Education Department at Boğaziçi University in İstanbul, Turkey. My MA thesis was on Processing Turkish center-embeddings: an investigation of case interference and prosodic phrase lengths.

In my dissertation supervised by Brian Dillon and Faruk Akkuş, I examine (i) whether item-to-item hierarchical structural relations (e.g., c-command) constrain initial memory access and (ii) how structurally available (e.g., c-commanding) items are made rapidly available for memory access. Empirically, I show evidence from a set of visual world experiments that relationally available target referents are reactivated more robustly and more rapidly than unavailable distractors during the resolution of the Turkish local reciprocal birbirleri 'each other'. Theoretically, I propose that structurally prominent linguistic items are selectively maintained in a privileged focal state for direct access—an account grounded in position-based architectures where linguistic elements are encoded and accessed via their structural information.

Here is my CV.

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