Hi there!

I’m Ebru, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, where I work with Elika Bergelson in the Laboratory for Developmental Studies on how infants learn their first words.

I study meaning: how it is represented in the mind, how children develop semantic and pragmatic competence, and how linguistic structure interacts with reasoning. My dissertation work, with David Barner in the Language and Development Lab at UC San Diego, focused on development of semantic and pragmatic competence, especially logical expressions like conditionals (“if”), disjunction (“or”), and free choice (“you may have tea or coffee”), all of which involve reasoning about possibilities. There I asked how adults compute these inferences in real time and why the same concepts are so hard for children to master.

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 Cambridge coffee shops, trying to look productive with my laptop (and sometimes succeeding!)