The University of Chicago
Department of Psychology
5848 South University Avenue
Chicago, IL, 60637
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Ozlem Ece Demir
Background
Ece is third year doctoral student in the Cognition program at the
University of Chicago, and recently defended her trial research project
entitled “What’s hidden in the hands? A cross-linguistic study of children’s
argument representation in speech and gesture”
She is a member of the labs of both Susan Goldin-Meadow and Susan Levine.
She graduated from Koc University, Turkey with a B.A. in Psychology in 2004. As an undergraduate she worked with Aylin Kuntay on early language development of typically-developing and blind Turkish-speaking children.
Research Interest
Ece is interested in early language development of both typically-developing and atypically-developing English- and Turkish-speaking children. Her current research focuses on cross-linguistic variation in speech and gesture. Specifically, she is interested in whether gesture can contain information that is not expressed in speech, and thus can be used to augment the tools provided by children’s spoken languages. Her second line of work focuses on early language learning in children with early unilateral brain injury. Currently, she is investigating their verb learning and its relation to the development of representations that underlie verbs in other domains, e.g. gesture and motor abilities.
Beyond Research
Ece is an active member of Psychology Graduate Students Organization (PGSO), where she serves as a member of Travel and Research Committee.
Publications and Presentations
Demir, Ö.E, & So, W.C. (In press). What’s
Hidden in the Hands? How Children
Use Gesture to Convey Arguments in a Motion Event. Boston University
Conference on Language Development 31 Proceedings. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla
Press.
Demir, Ö.E; Levine, S. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2006, June). Development of Verb and Verb Morphology Use in Children with Early Unilateral Brain Injury. Poster session presented at the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders. Madison, WI.
Demir, E., Küntay, A. & Özyürek, A. (2005, in Turkish). Görme engelli Türk çocuklarının ve annelerin işaret zamiri kullanımı: Dokunsal ortak dikkat . 2. Ulusal Dil ve Konuşma Bozuklukları Kongresi Bildiriler Kitabı. S. Topbaş (ed.).,sf., 95-104. Kök Yayıncılık, Ankara (The use of demonstrative pronouns in blind Turkish children and their mothers: Tactile Joint attention. Proceedings of the 2. National Language and Speech Disorders Congress, Eskişehir, Turkey).
Demir, Ö. E. (2003, July). Mothers Directive Input to Their Blind Children. Poster session presented at the Eighth European Congress of Psychology. Vienna, Austria.
