PhD Student

Status

My name is Gizem Aslan. I started working as a researcher/PhD student at the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences in March 2023 with a University-Specific (BOF) grant from Ghent University under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Kurt Eggers. Since November 2025, I have been working as a Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) researcher/PhD student in the same department with Prof. Dr. Kurt Eggers.

Research

Within my FWO-PhD project, named: ‘The role of attentional processes in developmental stuttering among multilingual children’, I am investigating the role of attentional processes in multilingual school-age children who do and do not stutter. The project evaluates how attention may be associated with stuttering and the unusually high frequency of typical disfluencies in multilingual children. Findings from this project will help ground the study of speech disfluencies, stuttering, and multilingualism within the broader context of domain-general processes (i.e., attention, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility). Moreover, it will contribute to future research studying diagnostic protocols for multilingual children known or suspected to stutter.

Background information

I received my Bachelor’s degree in Speech and Language Therapy at Hacettepe University (Turkey) in 2017. After graduation, I worked as a speech and language therapist for 3 years in Turkey. Later, I obtained my Master’s degree in Multilingualism from the University of Konstanz (Germany) in 2023. During my master’s, I worked as a student research assistant in multiple research projects at the Linguistics Department in the University of Konstanz. I speak Turkish (L1), English (L2 – C1), German (L3 – B2), Dutch (L4 – B1), and Arabic (L5 – A2).