Erim Kızıldere

erimprofile

I am a PhD candidate in the Psychology Graduate Program at UC Davis with the long-term goals of conducting impactful research on early development and teaching at a major research institution. Throughout my graduate career, I have developed expertise in caregiver-infant interactions. Infants spend their days engaged in activities like feeding, diapering, and playing, most of which involve caregivers. Importantly, these activities provide a context for infants’ learning about the world, with caregivers’ behaviors and language structuring and scaffolding that learning. I explore the moment-to-moment coordination of behaviors between parents and infants, aiming to understand how they respond to and shape each other’s behaviors in real time, how this coordination emerges, its mechanisms, and its role in infant learning.

Education and Degree(s)
  • M.A., Cognitive Psychology, Koç University, 2021
  • B.A., Psychology and Economics, Koç University, 2018
Honors and Awards
  • UC Davis Psychology Department Outstanding Mentorship Award, 2023
  • UC Davis Summer Research Fellowship, 2023
  • UC Davis Early Graduate Career Fellowship, 2022
Publications
  • Kızıldere, E., & Göksun, T. (2025). Playing minds: Parental pretend play input and infants’ vocabulary development. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 49(1), 26-37.
  • Esmer, Ş. C., Kızıldere, E., & Göksun, T. (2023). Smashing verb learning through parental sound symbolic input in preterm and full-term children. Language Acquisition, 31(3–4), 284–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2023.2257177
  • Aktan-Erciyes, A., Akbuğa, E., Kızıldere, E., & Göksun, T. (2023). Motion event representation in L1-Turkish versus L2-English speech and gesture: Relations to eye movements for event components. International Journal of Bilingualism, 27(1), 61–86.
  • Kızıldere, E., Esmer, E. C., & Göksun, T. (2022). From woof woof to dog: Interactions between parents’ use of sound symbolic words and infants’ vocabulary development. Infancy, 27(5), 972–996.
  • Kobaş, M., Kızıldere, E., Doğan, I., Aktan-Erciyes, A., Demir-Lira, Ö. E., Akman, İ., & Göksun, T. (2022). Motor skills, language development, and visual processing in preterm and full-term infants. Current Psychology, 1–13.
  • Kızıldere, E., Aktan-Erciyes, A., Tahiroğlu, D., & Göksun, T. (2020). A multidimensional investigation of pretend play and language competence: Concurrent and longitudinal relations in preschoolers. Cognitive Development, 54, 100870.
Documents