People

Aslı Aktan-Erciyes, PhD (Lab Director)

Aslı Aktan-Erciyes is the principal investigator of the SiLab. She is mainly interested in how language and cognition interact and how bilingualism influences this interaction. She has obtained her BA in Business Administration from Boğaziçi University, her MA and PhD in Psychological Sciences again from Boğaziçi University. Upon completion of her Ph.D., she worked as a post-doctoral researcher for a year at the Language and Cognition Lab at Koç University.

 

Graduate Research Assistants

Pınar Öztürk-Atlı (Lab Manager)

Pınar is an MA student at Kadir Has University. Her research interests are the evaluation of explanation quality, theory of mind ability in early childhood, and its effect on selective trust. She is also interested in studies in the theory of mind studies on bilingual children.

 

Büşra Sena Can

Büşra Sena is an MA student at Kadir Has University. Her research interests are language and memory, second language proficiency, and mind relation. She still continues her research on the relationship of recall in L1-Turkish and L2-English emotionally charged words. Her study was to determine whether the recall of emotionally charged words has the same intensity as the first language.

Tuğba Güler

Tuğba is an MA student at Kadir Has University under the supervision of Dr. Aslı Aktan-Erciyes. Her general research interests focus on the association between parenting and the cognitive development of children. Particularly, she is curious about the effects of parent-child interactions on the language acquisition process and theory of mind skills of preschoolers.

Demetsu Zelal Er

After her graduation from Vefa Anatolian High School, Demetsu studied psychology at Özyeğin University. Currently, she is an MA student at Kadir Has University. Her major is Psychological Sciences. She is interested in cognitive and social development in children. Specifically, the relationship between theory of mind and bilingualism, prejudice/ perceived threat and theory of mind, accent, and interpersonal evaluations are the topics she feels enthusiastic about.

Ayşenur Verkhovets

Ayşenur completed her undergraduate education in the Department of Psychology at Kadir Has University. Afterward, she continued her education in the Clinical Psychology Department at Beykoz University. She participated as a TUBITAK scholar in the project “Effects of Second Language Acquisition on Structural, Linguistic, and Perceptual Processes of Narrative Discourse in Preschool and School-Aged Children: A Longitudinal Study” within the SiLab.

Undergraduate Assistants

Açelya Yılmaz

Açelya is a third-year psychology student at Kadir Has University. She is interested in understanding how growing up bilingual affects children’s emotional intelligence and the impact of learning a new language on children in the coming years. She aims to examine the effects of growing up bilingual on their social lives. Additionally, she would like to investigate the impact of children’s bilingual use on cognitive development, particularly in terms of memory, concentration, and academic efficiency. Lastly, she is interested in exploring the effects of bilingualism on abstract thought.

Asude Firdevs Emara

After completing her BA in Boğaziçi University, Translation & Interpreting Studies, she has been a part of many labs as a research assistant, examining language from cognitive and developmental perspectives. Her main research interests are language and cognition, as well as bilingualism.

Berfin Mısırlı

Berfin graduated from the Department of Psychology (BA) at Kadir Has University with second place and high honors. Her research interests include language acquisition, cognitive skills, bilingualism, and cognitive and affective neuroscience. She is currently working on a project with lab members that examines the effect of second language proficiency on cognitive abilities in bilingual children. Additionally, Berfin is a research assistant at the Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience Lab, Koç University. 

Bilgesu Etli

Bilgesu is a third-year student at Kadir Has University, majoring in psychology. Additionally, she is one of the founding members of the Ethics and Philosophy Club at our school. Her main interests include researching the significant factors that influence a child’s cognitive, social, and emotional development, focusing specifically on understanding the pivotal role mothers play in these aspects.

Ece Yılmaz

She has been studying at SiLab for two years. Ece is interested in studies that approach language and individual differences from a multi-modal perspective. She particularly focuses on studies related to the interaction between iconic gestures and speech. Also, she is interested in individuals’ differential sensitivity in the understanding and production of co-speech iconic gestures and Electroencephalogram (EEG) studies that examine individual differences (such as dysfluency, executive functions, or bilingualism) in iconic gesture and speech interactions.

Kardelen Koç

Kardelen is a senior Psychology student at Kadir Has University and is also pursuing a double major in Theatre. She aims to combine these two professions in the future. Kardelen is particularly interested in child development and multimodal language.

Karla Tüzütürk

Karla graduated from Kadir Has University with a degree in Psychology in 2023. This is her third year in SiLab. She is interested in studying the differences in the development of social, cognitive, and emotional skills in bilingual children.

Klodya Üçkardeş

Klodya graduated from Psychology (BA) at Kadir Has University with an honors degree in 2023. Her research interest is, as a bilingual person, how affects and helps to be bilingual in language skills. Additionally, she has an interest in clinical psychology, specifically focusing on different treatment styles, personality disorders, and trauma. As a lab member, Klodya is actively involved in a project that aims to investigate whether bilingual children possess an advantage in learning new words due to their proficiency in two languages. Currently, in her gap year, she is dedicated to pursuing school approval for a master’s degree.

Larissa Tatyosoğlu

Larissa is a 4th-year undergraduate student at Kadir Has University. She is primarily interested in studying the interaction between children and technology, robot-child interaction, and human-robot interaction. Additionally, she focuses on children’s second language acquisition through technological devices. Larissa has been working at SiLab for two years as an undergraduate assistant.

Melike Filiz

Melike graduated from Kadir Has University (BA). Her research interests are child-parent interaction, and cognitive and language development. Specifically, language acquisition, attention, and theory of mind. She is part of research that was proposed in the last year under the supervision of the Aslı Aktan-Erciyes. She was the TUBITAK Star scholar in the Child and Family Research Lab. Currently, she is voluntarily working in both labs and preparing for the application for an MA.

Özden Yüksek

Özden is a 4th-year psychology student at Kadir Has University. She is interested in children’s language development and word recall abilities, especially in the preschool period, accompanied by gestures. She applied to the TUBITAK 2209-A project to investigate the contribution of using beat gestures to preschool children’s ability to recall words. Additionally, she is closely interested in child psychopathology. She is particularly interested in research aimed at understanding children’s behavioral and cognitive development in the early stages and would like to examine interventions that support children’s well-being.

Petek Keçe

Petek graduated from the psychology department at Kadir Has University in 2023. She is interested in the effects of being bilingual on various skills of children, such as theory of mind and emotional intelligence. This is her second year in SiLab.

Alumni

Songül Kandemir

Songül completed her MA at Kadir Has University. Her thesis title was “How are maternal and paternal causal language inputs associated with children’s causal language production and counterfactual thinking?”

Pınar Karataş

Pınar completed her MA at Kadir Has University. Her thesis title was “The relationship between bilingualism and creativity in preschool children.” Her research interests are creativity, L2 acquisition, bilingualism, and executive functions.

Elif Altın

Elif completed her MA at Kadir Has University. Her thesis title was “Left to right or right to left? Effect of writing direction on time perception in bilingual adults.” She is interested in bilingualism, the relationship between language and cognition, and moral decision-making in a second language.

Betül Firdevs Zengin

Betül completed her MA at Kadir Has University. Her thesis title was “The effects of second language proficiency and language distance on young adults’ executive functioning performance.”