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.
Elif Orakçı
Elif is a PhD student in the Psychology Department at Kadir Has University. She obtained her BA and MA from the Psychology Department at METU. She has been working as a research assistant in the Psychology Department at Istanbul University. Her research focuses on the interaction between the perspective of the speaker’s gestures and children’s spatial performances on visuospatial maps. She is interested in spatial and language development, multimodal communication, and audience-design studies.
Betül İset
Betül is an MA student at Istanbul University and has been working as a research assistant at the Turkish-German University. Her thesis focuses on conceptual development from a socio-cultural perspective. Her special research interests are the development of language and cognitive abilities of children and the role of social tools such as storybooks and technological devices in this process.
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.
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 and cognitive development.
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.
Elif Ayça Yiğit
Elif Ayça is a fourth-year psychology student at Kadir Has University, with a primary focus on child development, particularly linguistic skills, theory of mind, and social development. She has a strong interest in languages and multimodality, exploring how these factors influence children’s social and emotional abilities. Currently, she is contributing to the lab’s TUBITAK project as an undergraduate assistant.
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.
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.
Yağmur Sağlam
Ya
ğmur is a third-year psychology student at Kadir Has University. Her research interests focus on children’s cognitive, emotional, social, and language development, with a particular emphasis on trauma, stress, and attachment in children. With a strong dedication to SiLaB’s research on bilingualism, language development, narrative competence, executive functions, and creativity, she value its holistic approach to understanding children’s development.
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.”
Ece Yılmaz
Ece completed her BA degree in the Department of Psychology at Kadir Has University with a university/faculty/department degree (1st place) and high honors. Currently, she is an MA student at Kadir Has University in Psychological Sciences.
Kardelen Koç
Kardelen completed her BA in theatre and psychology at Kadir Has University. Currently, she is an MA student at Koç University in developmental psychology.
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.
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. 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.
Karla Tüzütürk
Karla graduated from Kadir Has University with a degree in Psychology in 2023. 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.
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.
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.