Bahar Tarakci

I am a PhD student in the Multimodal Language Department at MPI for Psycholinguistics, supervised by Prof. Dr. Asli Özyürek, Dr. Paula Rubio-Fernández, and Dr. Ercenur Ünal.

I am particularly interested in the interplay between language and cognition in various domains, including events, metaphors, and reference. During my PhD, I aim to tease apart the universal and linguistically diverse demands that referential communication makes on social cognition in natural and face-to-face interactions. My research primarily focuses on how speakers of different languages integrate their speech, gestures, and gaze in interactive and multimodal referential communication.

 

Previous education

I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey (2019). I then completed a Master’s degree in Developmental Psychology at Özyeğin University, Istanbul (2023), where I investigated the mechanisms underlying word learning of spatial metaphors. During and following my master’s, I worked as a full-time Research Associate in the Psychology Department at Özyeğin University. During this period, I was also involved in projects exploring how perceptual modalities shape event cognition and how language-specific encoding options and conceptual prominence influence event descriptions in speech and gesture.

 

Curriculum Vitae

Here, you can access my CV.