Hi there!

I’m Ebru, a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. I study meaning: how it is represented in the mind, how children develop semantic and pragmatic competence, and how linguistic structure interacts with reasoning.

I work with David Barner in the Language and Development Lab. My work has focused on experimental semantics and pragmatics, especially how adults compute inferences in real time, what discourse factors shape those inferences, and why children often fail to compute adult-like inferences. Most of my work centers on logical expressions like conditionals (“if”), disjunction (“or”), and free choice (“you may have tea or coffee”), all of which crucially involve reasoning about possibilities. With adults, I study how these expressions are processed in real time and what inferences they support. With children, I ask why these same concepts are so challenging to learn, what representations they consider along the way, how they understand the space of possible alternatives, and what allows them to progress from one stage of competence to the next.

Previously, I studied pronoun resolution in Turkish with Duygu Özge Sarısoy, examining how ambiguous pronouns are interpreted across contexts. I also worked on counterfactuals with Eva Wittenberg (formerly at UC San Diego, now at Central European University), investigating how uncertainty and alternatives are represented as a counterfactual utterance unfolds. And just recently, I started a new project with Rachel Dudley on children’s understanding of factivity in Turkish, looking at how input with factive verbs contributes to the acquisition of belief and knowledge verbs.

My CV can be found here, while I can be found in San Diego coffee shops, trying to look productive with my laptop (and sometimes succeeding!)