Şeyda Özçalışkan
Professor Psychology- Education
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2003
- Specializations
Gesture’s contribution to language and cognitive development in different learners and different languages
- Biography
As a psychological scientist, with a core interest in mechanism of developmental change, I study learners—child and adult—as they undergo paradigm shifts in their grasp and expression of increasingly complex concepts. More specifically, I examine how doing and observing gesture contribute to learning across different learners (e.g., individuals with blindness, deafness, autism, Down syndrome) and different learning environments (e.g., English vs. Spanish, monolingual vs. bilingual). Following this line of inquiry, I seek to understand the process of cognitive and language development and how gesture serves as part of the mechanism of change in this process as either reflecting underlying knowledge or helping learners take the next development step.
- Publications
Özçalışkan, Ş., Lucero, C., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2016). Is seeing gesture necessary to gesture like a native speaker? Psychological Science, 27(5), 737-747.
Özçalışkan, Ş. (2016). Do gestures follow speech in bilinguals’ description of motion? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19(3), 644-653.
Özçalışkan, Ş., Adamson, L. B., Dimitrova, N., & Baumann, S. (2017). Early gesture proves a helping hand to spoken vocabulary development for children with autism, Down syndrome and typical development. Journal of Cognition and Development. 18(3), 325-337.
Özçalışkan, Ş., Goldin-Meadow, S., Gentner, D. & Mylander, C. (2009). Does language about similarity foster similarity comparisons in deaf and hearing children? Cognition, 112(2), 217-228.
Özçalışkan, Ş. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2010). Sex differences in language first appear in gesture. Developmental Science, 13(5), 752-760.
For a complete list of publications:
Google scholar
Research gate