I am a Cognitive Scientist studying the human language system and its relation to other aspects of cognition. I have a particular focus on relational concepts—where things are located in space or who is doing what to whom, when and where in events. I study how relational concepts are mapped onto the multimodal language system in different languages, how children acquire these mappings, how they are processed during real-time language production and comprehension, and whether acquiring them reshapes conceptual representations across development. To address these issues, I take an interdisciplinary and multimethod approach combining perspectives in psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science. My work leverages cross-linguistic and cross-modal variation to identify which aspects of cognition are universally shared, which are shaped by multimodal language use and learning, and how language and cognition interact across development.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology in 2016 at University of where I worked with Anna Papafragou. Then, I received postdoctoral training at Radboud University and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Between 2018 and 2024, I was first Assistant, then Associate Professor of Psychology at Özyeğin University in Istanbul where I directed the Language Cognition and Development Lab. Since September 2024, I am a staff scientist in the Multimodal Language Department at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.