After completing a BA degree in Ankara Hecettepe University, Hatice Zora moved to Sweden to pursue her master’s degree at Lund University. Here, she gradually became interested in neurolinguistics. After finishing her MA, she eventually got accepted for the PhD program at Stockholm university and the Department of Lingusitics. She received her doctor’s degree in 2016 after defending her dissertation Mapping prosody onto the lexicon: Memory traces for lexically specified prosodic information in the brain. Upon gaining her PhD, she stayed at the Department of Linguistics as a research assistant and later as a postdoctoral researcher.

"My time at Stockholm University has always rewardning, both personally and academically," says Hatice Zora, who currently is working at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands. Photo by Anneli Larsson

Research on information structure and prosody

At Max Planck Institute and the Neurobiology of Language Department, Hatice Zora is doing research on information structure. Her aim is to understand wheter the same neurobiological infrastructure on play for information packaging across diverse languages. Another common thread in her research is prosody, that is, the expressive power of speech. 

"In my research, I try to understand one of the most enigmatic functions of the brain: spoken communication. And while doing that, I use prosody as a tool. Without saying a word, we can communicate a lot just through prosody. We can for instance signal whether we are angry or happy by simply using the tone of voice. It is largely thanks to intonation that we find some speakers more interesting to listen to. Or Swedish ‘anden’ can be found both in a bottle and in a lake by virtue of pitch. I am fascinated with all these diverse communicative operations based on prosody, and investigate their interpretation and integration in the brain," says Hatice Zora.