Demet Özer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Education
- PhD, Cognitive Psychology, Koç University, Turkey (2016 – 2021)
Research
Dr. Özer’s research mainly focuses on language in its multimodal, situated, and interactive context. She examines how people coordinate speech and speech-accompanying communicative cues (e.g., iconic gestures, social eye-gaze) during communication, thinking and learning, as well as the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying this coordination. Dr. Özer’s research employs perspectives from the cognitive science and psycholinguistics literatures and investigate multimodal language and cognition across different contexts. In her lab, various methodologies such as linguistic tasks that allow for linguistic and gesture analyses (e.g., linguistic complexity, kinematic analysis of gesture), behavioral paradigms (e.g., online language processing tasks such as semantic mismatch paradigms), eye-tracking, and electrophysiological measures (EEG) are used.
Selected Publications
Özer, D., Soyman, E., Badakul, A.N., Arslan, B., Yılmaz, F.S., & Göksun, T. (in press). Distinct temporal dynamics of speech and gesture processing: Insights from event-related potentials across L1 and L2. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Özer, D., Özyürek, A., & Göksun, T. (2025). Spatial working memory is critical for gesture processing: Evidence from gestures with varying semantic links to speech. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 32, 1639-1653. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02642-4
Aslan, Z., Özer, D., & Göksun, T. (2024). Exploring emotions through co-speech gestures: The caveats and new directions. Emotion Review, 16(4), 265-275. https://doi.org/10.1177/17540739241277820
Özer, D., Karadöller, D. Z., Özyürek, A., & Göksun, T. (2023). Gestures that are cued by demonstratives in speech guide listeners’ visual attention during spatial language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(9), 2623–2635. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001402
Özer, D. & Göksun, T. (2020). Visual-spatial and verbal abilities differentially affect processing of gestural vs. spoken expressions. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 35(7), 896-914. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1703016.
For a complete list of publications, please visit my Google Scholar profile:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-uOhXiUAAAAJ&hl=en