Welcome!

I'm a fourth year Linguistics PhD student at the University of Southern California. I am advised by Prof. Zuzanna Fuchs and Prof. Elsi Kaiser. My research areas are primarily in psycholinguistics and heritage bilingualism. Specifically, I focus on sentence processing, lexical access, and morphological processing as well as predictive processing in heritage speakers and L2 learners.

At present, I am a a research assistant (RA) leading a project on the role of overt vs. null agreement markers in Spanish heritage speakers’ processing of gender at the Psycholinguistics of Mono- and Multilingualism Lab (PoMMLab) at USC. I am also a member of the Language Processing lab at USC.

I completed my MA in Linguistics with TESOL specialization at the California State University, Long Beach, where I worked as a Graduate Research Assistant of Dr. Michael Fender working on ambiguity resolution and sentence processing. My MA thesis focused on the Processing of Turkish and English Derivational Morphology by Heritage Turkish speakers.

Previously, I worked as a research assistant at the Human Abilities in Bilingual Language Acquisition (HABLA) Lab at the University of California, Irvine with Prof. Elizabeth Peña on the acquisition of morphosyntax by Spanish-English bilingual children.

I received my BA in Foreign Language Education (TESOL) at the Middle East Technical University in my home country, Turkey.