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’ and trilinguals’ L2/L3 word recognition, more specifically, how bi/trilinguals 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 pie, foot in Spanish. To explore the role of L1-L2 distance in bi/trilingual language processing, I’m comparing bi/trilingual speakers of close vs distant languages from different linguistic contexts:
- Experiment 1, comparing Turkish-English and Spanish-English bilinguals from monolingual communities
- Experiment 2, comparing Basque-Spanish and Catalan-Spanish bilinguals from bilingual communities
- Experiment 3, comparing L2 and L3 word recognition in Azerbaijani-Turkish-English trilinguals immersed in a monolingual community
My PhD supervisors are Prof Mits Ota and Prof Martin Pickering.
We are have submitted a manuscript based on data from Experiments 1 and 2 for publication.
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.
Our paper ‘The unpredictable role of language distance in bilingual cognition: A systematic review from brain to behavior’ is published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
I recently created LexTurk, a short Turkish proficiency test based on the English LexTALE (Lemhöfer & Broersma, 2012) with Levent Uzun, Umut Salihoğlu and Uğur Çetinavcı. Here is the methodology pre-print Introducing LexTurk: A quick lexical test for learners of Turkish, describing LexTurk’s validity.
We will upload stimuli, instructions, and downloadable materials to the LexTurk website in due course.
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.