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. Relational concepts are a central aspect of cognition, yet their expression in language is characterized by considerable variability. I am interested in two kinds of variability: cross-linguistic differences in formal features devices in spoken languages (e.g., grammatically required versus optional distinctions, partitioning of the semantic space) and the affordances of different expressive modalities—such as, speech or gesture—that give rise to distinct mapping requirements between language and cognition. 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.