Gözde Mercan

Gözde Mercan has been an assistant professor in the teaching stream at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations of the University of Toronto, since September 2020. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Science with a major in Linguistics and a minor in Psychology. Professor Mercan has been affiliated with prestigious institutions including Harvard University, the University of Oslo, the University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, and several top-ranking universities in Turkey.

Professor Mercan’s research centers on how learners of Turkish as a foreign, second, additional, or heritage language understand and produce Turkish words and sentences. Her current project investigates how L2 learners of Turkish comprehend ambiguous complex sentences in real-time. She also explores the word-order preferences of multilingual Turkish speakers and the mental representation of loanwords of Arabic, Persian, and French origin alongside their native Turkish equivalents.

At U of T, Professor Mercan teaches Turkish language courses at all levels as well as courses related to Turkish literature, TV, cinema, media, and communication. Her teaching and research complement each other. She believes that insights into language learning enhance teaching practices, and that real-life classroom experiences enrich and inspire L2 research. Reflecting this philosophy, she recently organized an international online workshop “Research-Based Practices in the Teaching of Turkish as L2” bringing together researchers and educators in this field.

Professor Mercan is a member of the Executive Board and the Conference Academic Committee of the American Association of the Teachers of Turkic Languages(AATT). In 2023, she organized AATT’s Roundtable “Teaching Turkish in North America on the Centennial of the Republic” at the Annual Meeting of the Middle Eastern Studies Association. She is also a co-organizer of NMC’s Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies and serves as the vice-president of the Canadian Society for the Advancement of Turkish Studies. Additionally, she is a member of U of T’s Global Languages Initiative and Data Science Institute.

Professor Mercan is passionate about teaching the Turkish language and culture, and studying how individuals learn, comprehend, produce, and use this beautiful language.

Awards

• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant for the project “How do L2 learners resolve ambiguities in complex sentences?” (Ongoing)
• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Institutional Grant (SIG) for the project “A corpus investigation of Turkish possessive NPs” (2024)
• Jackman Humanities Institute and Victoria College, Scholars-in-Residence (SiR) Program Funding for the project “Words of foreign origin in Turkish: An experimental investigation of speakers’ mental lexicons” (2023)
• University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science Tri-Council Bridge Funding for the project The comprehension, production, and use of the Turkish language by bi-/multilingual speakers in Canada” (2021)
• Dean’s Merit Award, NMC, Faculty of Arts & Science (2021)
• The Psychonomic Society and Women in Cognitive Science Networking Award for Junior Scientists (2020)