You are cordially invited to the online research seminar organized by the Department of Educational Sciences.
Title: Learning from Prediction Error: Structural Priming in Second Language Sentence Processing
Speaker: Duygu Fatma Şafak (Bilkent University)
Date: May15, 2026
Time: 16:30-17:30
Location: Zoom
This is an online seminar. To request event details please send a message to department.
Abstract: How do second language (L2) learners adapt to linguistic input in real time, and what mechanisms support learning during sentence processing? One influential proposal is that language processing is shaped by prediction-based mechanisms, whereby mismatches between expectations and input (prediction errors) can give rise to learning. In this talk, I explore how structural priming can be understood within this framework as a window into prediction-error–driven learning in L2 sentence processing.
Across a series of visual world eye-tracking studies, I examine how prior exposure to specific syntactic structures influences subsequent comprehension, and how such effects vary as a function of predictability, grammatical knowledge, and the availability of structural alternatives. The findings suggest that structural priming in L2 comprehension is sensitive to prediction error, but critically constrained by learners’ grammatical representations and by whether alternative structures are available for adaptation.
Taken together, these results are consistent with accounts that conceptualise structural priming as reflecting prediction-error-driven learning, while highlighting important conditions under which such learning can – and cannot – take place in an L2.
Bio: Duygu Şafak is Assistant Professor in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at Bilkent University. She received her BA and MA in English Language Teaching from Middle East Technical University (METU), where she worked as a research and teaching assistant, and her PhD in Linguistics from the Technical University of Braunschweig (TU Braunschweig). She subsequently held positions there as a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher as part of the German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded research unit Structuring the Input in Language Processing, Acquisition and Change (SILPAC).
Her research lies at the intersection of psycholinguistics and second language acquisition, with a particular focus on real-time sentence processing and predictive mechanisms in second language comprehension. Methodologically, she employs experimental approaches including visual-world eye-tracking, eye-tracking during reading, and behavioural paradigms such as self-paced reading. Her work has appeared in journals such as Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, and Second Language Research.
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