Hi! Merhaba! 

I am a researcher in psycholinguistics, fascinated by the cognitive basis of language learning and processing. My research focuses on bilingual cognition, exploring how the mind navigates the complexities of multiple languages. Through psycholinguistic experiments and corpus analyses, I aim to address four key questions: 

(a) How do monolingual and bilingual speakers process and mentally represent words and phrases? 

(b) What role does frequency play in language learning and processing? 

(c) How do individual differences influence language learning and bilingual cognition? 

(d) How do learning mechanisms adapt to the rich diversity of statistical properties of typologically diverse languages?

My name is pronounced ”Doh+oosh Jaan Oek+sooz”, and my pronouns are he/him.

Current Research Projects 

I am involved in two exciting projects in Lancaster University's Linguistics and English Language department. 

• Individual  differences in Turkish Heritage Speakers' Lexical and Grammatical Processing 

Funded through Lancaster's FASS Research Fund, this collaborative project with colleagues from the Arctic University of Norway uses reaction-time visual world eye-movement and production paradigms to investigate Turkish heritage speakers' comprehension and production of evidentiality. We also investigate how an interplay of social and cognitive individual differences such as language exposure and executive functioning influence these processes. 

• Portuguese Second Language Learners' Learning and Processing of Multiword Expressions 

Funded by Lancaster University’s Camões Institute, this collaborative project with colleagues from Lancaster University and the University of Lisbon conducts experiments and learner corpus analyses, to investigate how Portuguese learners' learn, process and mentally represent multiword expressions. 

Feel free to explore my research, publications, and ongoing projects. If you're interested in collaborations or have questions, do reach out!