Hatice Zora

Hatice Zora is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, affiliated with the Multimodal Language Department. Her research focuses on the neurobiological and cognitive mechanisms underlying prosodic processing, information structure, and the interplay between categorical and continuous aspects of speech signals.

Key research areas include:

• Neurobiology of Information Structure (IS): Investigating how prosodic and morpho-syntactic cues signal given/new information in discourse, with studies on Swedish, Turkish, and Spanish.
• Prosody and Lexical Tone: Exploring crosstalk between intonation and lexical tones across tonal/non-tonal languages, using behavioral and electrophysiological methods.
• Discourse Markers: Analyzing EEG correlates of predictive functions of discourse markers in Spanish conversations.

Collaborators include Prof. Peter Hagoort (MPI), Prof. Mattias Heldner (Stockholm University), and Prof. Carlos Gussenhoven (Radboud University). She advises MA student Sevilay Şengül at Radboud University and contributes to projects on gesture marking and prosody-lexicon interactions.