People

Principal Investigator

Ercenur Ünal is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and director of the Language, Cognition and Development Lab at Özyeğin University. She completed her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at University of Delaware and conducted postdoctoral work at Radboud University and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Dr. Ünal studies the relation between language and cognition using developmental, cross-linguistic and multimodal approaches in the domains of mental state understanding and event cognition.

Ercenur.Unal@ozyegin.edu.tr | website 

Graduate Students and Staff

Bahar Tarakçı

Lab coordinator, M.A. Alumni
 

Bahar is interested in language-thought interactions, language acquisition, multimodal communication, and polysemy. Currently, she focuses on how perceptual processes can interact with the language acquisition mechanism and event perception in our lab.

Bilge Tınaz

M.A. Student, 3rd year
 
Bilge’s research interests include language-thought interactions, multimodal communication, language acquisition and development. She is working on our TÜBİTAK 1001 project “Event Representation in Cognition, Language and Development.”

Ceren Barış

M.A. Student, 2nd year
 

Ceren’s research interests include relationship between language and thought, as well as social cognition, particularly theory of mind. She is working on our TÜBİTAK 1001 project “Event Representation in Cognition, Language and Development.”

Lab Alumni

Gökçen Avcılar

M.A. Psychology, 2022

Kevser Kırbaşoğlu

M.A. Psychology, 2022

Cansu Gökbalkan

M.A. Psychology, 2020

Undergraduate students

  • Yiğit Yargılı (B.A. in Psychology, 2022); went onto M.Sc. program in Behavioral Neuroscience at Bielefeld University, Germany
  • Zeynep Bolluk (B.A. in Psychology, 2022); went onto M.A. program in Cognitive Science at Osnabrück University, Germany
  • Bilge Bilir (B.A. in Psychology, 2022); went onto M.A. program in Clinical Psychology at Bahçeşehir University, Turkey
  • Asude Eraçıkbaş (B.A. in Translation and Interpreting Studies, 2020; Boğaziçi University); went onto M.Sc. program in Neuroscience, Language and Communication at University College London, UK
  • Ceren Barış (B.A. in Psychology, 2022; Boğaziçi University); went onto M.A. program in Applied Developmental Psychology at Özyeğin University, Turkey
  • Selin Ünser (B.A. in Psychology, 2022); went onto M.A. program in Applied Developmental Psychology at Özyeğin University, Turkey
  • Tuğçe Açıklalın (B.A. in Psychology, 2022; Boğaziçi University)
  • Şevval Cihankaya (B.A. in Psychology, 2021); went onto M.A. program in Educational Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium
  • İlayda Piri (B.A. in Psychology, 2021); went onto M.A. program in Development and Socialization in Childhood and Adolescence at Utrecht University, The Netherlands
  • Zeynep Coşkun (B.A. in Psychology, 2021); went onto M.A. Program in Developmental Psychology at Koç University, Turkey
  • Özge Baturlar (B.A. in Psychology, 2019); went onto M.A. program in Development and Socialization in Childhood and Adolescence at Utrecht University, The Netherlands
  • Melis Hazır (B.A. in Psychology, 2018); went onto M.Sc. in Cognitive Psychology at Middle East Technical University, Turkey