Melis Çetinçelik

Melis is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University. She received her PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen in 2024. Her doctoral research explored the neural mechanisms underlying the role of social and audiovisual cues in early language development in infants. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology, Tilburg University, where she investigated brain processes involved in audiovisual speech perception in both clear and noisy environments.

Melis’ research focuses on individual differences in language development and the neural mechanisms underlying multimodal language processing. More specifically, she examines how auditory, visual and social information are integrated in the brain during communication, and how these processes develop in infants and children. In everyday, face-to-face interactions, speech is often accompanied by visual signals such as lip movements and hand gestures, which can support comprehension when the auditory signal is unclear, for example in noisy settings or when children are learning language. Her work investigates neurocognitive mechanisms of multimodal language processing and how these processes relate to language and reading development.

At the MBIC Brain & Language Lab, Melis combines neuroimaging and behavioural methods to investigate individual differences in language and reading development from the earliest stages of life.