Research
My research focuses on the role of language distance in bilingual language processing. Language distance can be defined as the overlap between linguistic (e.g., lexical, phonetic, morphosyntactic, orthographic) features across languages. Specifically, I look at whether L1-L2 distance affects bilingual lexical access.
As part of my PhD research, I’m currently exploring bilinguals’ L2 word recognition, more specifically, how bilinguals process interlingual homographs, i.e., words with identical spelling and different meanings across languages. For instance, how Turkish-English bilinguals process words like bay, gentleman in Turkish; or how Spanish-English bilinguals process pan, bread in Spanish. To explore the role of L1-L2 distance in bilingual language processing, I’m comparing bilingual speakers of close vs distant languages from different linguistic contexts:
- Study 1, comparing Turkish-English and Spanish-English bilinguals from one-language contexts
- Study 2, comparing Basque-Spanish and Catalan-Spanish bilinguals from two-language contexts
- Study 3, comparing L2 and L3 word recognition in Azeri-Turkish-English trilinguals from one-language contexts
My PhD supervisors are Prof Mits Ota and Prof Martin Pickering.
I also worked with Evelina Leivada, Camilla Masullo, Marit Westergaard and Jason Rothman on a systematic review of the role of language distance in bilingual cognition. You can find a pre-print here.
For my MA thesis, I focused on how L1-Turkish and L1-Spanish learners of English processed interlingual homographs in an L2 lexical decision task. The task also included control words (matched in frequency and length) and English-like non-words. If you are interested in the stimuli used for this study, you can find them here.