Melis Çetinçelik

Melis is a PhD student at the Language Development Department. After her BA in Psychology at Koç University, Turkey, she moved to the Netherlands to study Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. In 2018, she started her PhD at the MPI for Psycholinguistics.

Her research investigates how babies learn language, and how social cues used by adults help them in the language processing. In particular, she studies how infant brains track the rhythm of speech, and whether social cues, such as the caregiver’s eye gaze towards the infant, facilitates speech processing and learning from the speech signal. The main goal of her PhD is to study infant language development in a multimodal context to understand how babies learn language from dynamic, naturalistic adult-infant interactions.

She enjoys baking, reading, movies and travelling.

Screens and kids: is screen time bad for language development?

By Melis Çetinçelik / 9 August 2021

Children are born into a world where technology is all around us. This raises questions about children’s screen time habits, and the effects of screen time on their language development. Research suggests that the content as well as how children view screens are important, and that social interaction during screen time is crucial in helping young children learn from videos.