Biography
Prof. Dr. Bilal Kırkıcı is a Professor of Psycholinguistics at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Faculty of Education, Middle East Technical University (METU). With over 25 years of experience in research and teaching, he completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at METU and the University of Essex, UK. He has held academic and research positions at METU, Başkent University, and the University of Oxford, and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Essex as a British Academy Fellow.
His research explores how words and grammatical structures are represented and processed in the mind, how reading processes develop, how bilinguals manage their languages, and how language processing changes with aging and in clinical populations such as OCD and schizophrenia. His work on morphological and syntactic processing has contributed to shaping theories on how the brain analyzes complex words and sentences. His studies have appeared in leading journals, including Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Applied Psycholinguistics, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Second Language Research, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition.
Prof. Kırkıcı has served as principal investigator, researcher, and consultant in numerous national and international projects supported by TÜBİTAK and other research organizations. Among these are a COST Action project (as researcher and steering committee member) that identified the language skills children and adolescents need to participate effectively in judicial processes; a TÜBİTAK 1001 project (as consultant; PI: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hale Işık Güler) on English-medium instruction in higher education; and another TÜBİTAK 1001 project (as principal investigator) examining lexical processing in older adults.
He is the founder and director of the METU Language Processing Research Group (LaProc) (https://blog.metu.edu.tr/laproc/), which develops national and international projects on lexical processing, bilingualism, aging, clinical populations, reading development, and cognitive processes. LaProc also plays a key role in mentoring young researchers. By combining theoretical frameworks with data-driven experimental methods, the group produces original insights into the relationship between language and cognition.
In addition to his academic work, Prof. Kırkıcı has held several major administrative roles, including Vice Dean of the METU Faculty of Education (2018–2019, 2025–ongoing), Director of the METU School of Foreign Languages (2019–2022), and Chair of the Department of English Language Teaching at METU (2016–2018). Through these positions, he has gained substantial experience in institutional strategy, educational policy development, and the management of research and teaching in higher education. In his current role as Vice Dean, he leads initiatives focused on internationalization.
At FabuLAB, Prof. Bilal Kırkıcı brings together his scientific expertise, educational vision, and leadership experience to create research-based, human-centered language learning solutions. Together with the FabuLAB team, he reimagines language learning not merely as a skill but as a transformative experience that supports cognitive health and lifelong learning.
Education
- 1997 METU, Foreign Language Education (BA)
- 2000 METU, English Language Teaching (MA)
- 2001 Essex University, Applied Linguistics (MA)
- 2005 METU, English Language Teaching (PhD)
Selected Publications
- Kahraman, H., Kırkıcı, B., & Beyersmann, E. (2025). Two decades later: letter transpositions within and across morpheme boundaries in L1 and L2 speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1-19.
- Oğuz, E., & Kırkıcı, B. (2023). The processing of morphologically complex words by developing readers of Turkish: a masked priming study. Reading and Writing, 36(8), 2053-2080.
- Duñabeitia, J. A., Baciero, A., Antoniou, K., Antoniou, M., Ataman, E., Baus, C., ... & Pliatsikas, C. (2022). The multilingual picture database. Scientific data, 9(1), 431.
- Nazli, Ş. B., Koçak, O. M., Kırkıcı, B., Sevındık, M., & Kokurcan, A. (2019). Investigation of the Processing of Noun and Verb Words with fMRI in Patients with Schizophrenia. Archives of Neuropsychiatry, 57(1), 9.
