Tilbe Göksun

Language and Cognition Lab is ready for the new term! ☺️🎉

Top: Modality shift in block instruction: R1: Take the green block and put it on the left side of the grid. A hand is holding an imaginary piece toward the left column of a 2×2 grid; label reads Redundant position and orientation. R4: the green block pointing this way. A hand is pointing near the bottom left cell with an arrow showing movement toward the top left cell; label reads Complementary position and orientation. Target tower: a 3 block green and red C-shape tower on a 2x2 grid. Bottom: Modality shift in tower instruction: R1: they are going to form a C-shape. A c-shape hand pose with the index and thumb is shown far from the grid; the label reads No information about position or orientation. R4: Put the C on the left side, facing away from you. Right hand shows the C shape facing away, and left hand with the palm open indicates placement on the left side; labels read Redundant position and orientation.

People form ad hoc conventions, establishing linguistic & gestural abstractions, and shift information across speech and gesture to communicate more efficiently over time.

We study this in our #CHI2026 paper, led by Kiyosu Maeda with @judithfan.bsky.social @rdhawkins.bsky.social and team

🧵👇
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Deconstructing Block Building Behaviours in 7- to 9-year-olds; Associations with Spatial and Mathematics Performance Block construction performance is related to mathematics and block construction training leads to improvement in mathematics. However, block construction is a complex task, and it is unknown which ...

📣📣 A recent paper by Emily K Farran et al. in JCD:

"Deconstructing Block Building Behaviours in 7- to 9-year-olds; Associations with Spatial and Mathematics Performance"

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Graphic announcing an award. On the left, text reads “Congratulations to Damián Blasi, Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Study. Winner of the FABBS Early Career Impact Award.” The background is dark teal with light green and white text. On the right, a portrait of Damián Blasi, a man with short dark hair wearing a black polo shirt.

The CogSci Society would like to congratulate the brilliant Dr. Damián Blasi @damianblasi.bsky.social for being awarded the 2026 Early Career Impact Award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences @fabbs.org 👏👏👏

Learn more at cognitivesciencesociety.org/fabbs-early-...

Here is the first published paper of 2026 in JEP: General led by Demet & Efe! Very happy about this EEG paper in which we assessed temporal dynamics of speech and gesture processing in L1 and L2! @kudilvebilis.bsky.social

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Check out our new paper about children’s multimodal imitation, which has been published in the special issue “Multimodal language, communication and thinking” (eds. @tilbegoksun.bsky.social @ecedemirlira.bsky.social) in Cognitive Development

Last week, we welcomed Mert Kobaş, a former master’s student in our lab, who shared his doctoral research at New York University (NYU). Thank you, Mert! 🥳

Talking Hands, Shifting Tongues: How Does the Use of Co-speech Gestures and Second Language Relate to Emotional Autobiographical Memory Narration? - İbrahim Akkan, Cagla Aydin, Sami Gülgöz, Tilbe Göks... Gestures can play a role in narrating emotionally valenced autobiographical events, particularly in second language use. We investigated how hand gestures, phen...

New article led by our PhD student İbrahim Akkan on how gestures and L2 speech relate to emotional autobiographical memory narration!

@ibrahimakkan.bsky.social
@caglaaydin.bsky.social
@sgulgoz.bsky.social
@tilbegoksun.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1177/1747...

New study led by Aslı Aktan-Erciyes and Tilbe Göksun!
@aslierciyes.bsky.social
@tilbegoksun.bsky.social

"Narrative development in L1-Turkish children: A longitudinal examination of L2-English immersion effects"

bit.ly/4sj9QOM

Lab direktörümüz Tilbe Göksun'un Bilim Akademisi'ne asli üye olarak seçildiğini duyurmaktan mutluluk duyuyoruz! @bilimakademisi.bsky.social

We are proud to announce that our PI Tilbe Göksun has been elected to the Science Academy (Bilim Akademisi)!
@tilbegoksun.bsky.social

Bilim Akademisinin yeni üyeleri (Kasım 2025) - Bilim Akademisi 28 Kasım 2025’te gerçekleşen Genel Kurulda Bilim Akademisine 16 yeni asli üye seçildi. Ali Fuat Kalyoncu – Allerji ve İmmünolojik Hastalıklar, Hacettepe Üniversitesi Arzucan Özgür – Bilgisayar Mühendi...

28 Kasım 2025’te gerçekleşen Bilim Akademisi Genel Kurulunda 16 yeni asli üye seçildi.

Detaylar bağlantıda.
bilimakademisi.org/bilim-akadem...

Your brain undergoes four dramatic periods of change from age 0 to 90 Our brain wiring seems to undergo four major turning points at ages 9, 32, 66 and 83, which could influence our capacity to learn and our risk of certain conditions

Our brain wiring seems to undergo four major turning points at ages 9, 32, 66 and 83, which could influence our capacity to learn and our risk of certain conditions

Thank you, Jamie!

Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures As part of the multimodal language system, gestures play a vital role for listeners, by capturing attention and providing information. Similarly, disfluencies serve as a cue for the listeners about o...

Our new paper in Cognitive Science, led by Can! @canavci.bsky.social

"Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures"

Cognitive Science - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

@kudilvebilis.bsky.social

What enables human language? A biocultural framework Explaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of l...

What enables human language? A biocultural framework. New paper by Inbal Arnon & al. with @limorraviv.bsky.social , @profsimonfisher.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1126/science.adq8303

Brain structural networks underlying language | Physiological Reviews | American Physiological Society The unique human ability to process complex language requires the interaction of multiple brain areas located in the inferior frontal and posterior temporal cortex connected by white matter fiber trac...

A very useful review and update on the anatomic infratstructure for language:
"Brain structural networks underlying language" by
Angela Friederici
journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Cultural Constructions of Parent–Child Spatial Interactions Cultural influences, such as a language’s reading direction and parents’ everyday interactions, can impact a child’s asymmetric mapping of information to the left and right sides of space. To deter...

📣📣 A recent paper by Abigail Wolff et al. in JCD:

"Cultural Constructions of Parent–Child Spatial Interactions: Journal of Cognition and Development"

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Join APS on November 5 for a free workshop on science writing and storytelling. Learn tips for engaging and accessible science communication and make sure to bring your questions! #SciComm #AcademicSky
https://instats.org/seminar/science-writing-and-storytelling

🚨 New publication: How to improve conceptual clarity in psychological science?

Thrilled to see this article with @ruimata.bsky.social out. We discuss how LLMs can be leveraged to map, clarify, and generate psychological measures and constructs.

Open access article: doi.org/10.1177/0963...

Published today: One of the biggest #science #communication studies to date. We asked 71,922 people in 68 countries how they #engage with information about #science and combined the data with several country-level factors: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #OpenAccess

Know someone whose excellence in research and contributions to the CogSci community should be recognized? Nominate them to be a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society!

Deadline: Nov 1
More info: cognitivesciencesociety.org/fellows/

Earlier this year, Dr. Jane Goodall sat down for an interview for Brad Falchuk’s new Netflix series, Famous Last Words.

The premise of the series is to interview people on the condition that the interview not air until the subject has passed away.

Our PI Tilbe Göksun was a keynote speaker at IEEE ICDL Conference held in Prague with her talk on the links between spatial cognition and multimodal language!

@tilbegoksun.bsky.social
@ieee-icdl.bsky.social

I am over the moon to see that my wonderful PhD advisor, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, received the APS Mentor Award. She is absolutely the best, and I am honored to be her mentee 💙

You are the BEST! I am so thrilled that you received this award. Proud to be your student!!! Congratulations!

Why does a speech pause make us doubt, but a hand gesture make us sure? - Cognitive Science Society Welcome to CogSci Unpacked, an exciting blog series dedicated to summarizing academic papers from the Cognitive Science, a CSS Journal. Our goal is to bridge the gap between academia and the broader p...

Why does a speech pause make us doubt, but a hand gesture make us sure? 🤔🧠

Find the answer on the @cogscisociety.bsky.social blog!

cognitivesciencesociety.org/why-does-a-s...

w/ @reyhanfurman.bsky.social, @tilbegoksun.bsky.social, and Terry Eskenazi

@kudilvebilis.bsky.social

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

New publication from L&C Lab led by our former member Gyulten Hyusein and our PI Tilbe Göksun!
@gyultenhyusein.bsky.social
@tilbegoksun.bsky.social

"The Role of Non-Representational Hand Gestures in Creative Thinking"

Read the article 👇
www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/10...

A recent work from our lab on creativity & gestures by Gulten!
@gyultenhyusein.bsky.social

Take-home message: Non-representational gestures do not facilitate and might even hurt creativity

Demographic Biases in Naturalistic Language Recordings in the CHILDES Database In recent years, the importance of estimating demographic biases in research has become apparent. Here, we provide a systematic review of the CHILDES database, the major source of naturalistic record....

The original paper can be reached from here:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...