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PhD Zuzanna Fuchs: Openness to others can work wonders in research work

PhD Zuzanna Fuchs is an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Southern California and director of the Psycholinguistics of Monolingual and Multilingualism Laboratory (PoMMLab) at USC. PhD Fuchs’ research focuses on noun categorization systems, including grammatical gender, animacy and noun classes. They target both monolingual and bilingual speakers of languages with noun categorization systems.

How did your adventure in science begin?
When I was in college I was able to do a summer program called Pembroke-Kings Programme at Cambridge University. The program offered a Supervision component, in which I could work 1-on-1 with a faculty member on a research project that I proposed. In my earlier coursework at Columbia (where I did my undergraduate studies) I had learned about a language called Wakhi (an endangered language spoken in Tajikistan), and I had learned that one of the only existing grammars of Wakhi was stored at Cambridge University, so under the guidance of Prof. Bert Vaux I was able to find the grammar and research a certain aspect of the language that I was interested in. I no longer do work on Wakhi, but that experience was the first time I had the experience of uncovering data and proposing a novel analysis – real research – and I had the strong sense that this was what I wanted to continue to do.

What factors made you decide to go abroad? What were the biggest challenges associated with this decision?
I was 8 months old when I left the country, so the decision was not mine but my parents’. We did travel to Poland every year for a few months during the summer and I was able to maintain a close connection to the Polish language and culture. Still, there were a lot of challenges associated with growing up bilingual and bi-cultural. I was always too American for my Polish peers to think of me as Polish, and a little too Polish for my American peers to think of me as American. This kind of split identity is well described in the literature on second generation immigrants in the US, and I can certainly say from personal experience that it is not easy to navigate!

What are the benefits to you of working in an international scientific environment compared to working in Poland?
Linguistics is a very international field, and I benefit immensely from research networks both here in the US and in Poland. I don’t think I know enough about what my life would be like if I had remained in Poland to be able to make a clear comparison.

Do you maintain contact with the Polish scientific community?
Yes! As some of my research on language processing is on Polish (both among heritage speakers in the US and among Polish speakers living in Poland), I have developed some really exciting connections to the University of Warsaw Faculty of Psychology. I was there in Nov/Dec 2023 as a Mentor under the IDUB programme (https://inicjatywadoskonalosci.uw.edu.pl/en/programme/about/) and I am working on an upcoming project with Aneta Miękisz and Grzegorz Krajewski.


What are you currently working on and what is the main subject of your scientific research?
My research pertains to understanding how grammatical gender is represented in the mental lexicon. Speakers of languages with grammatical gender have to store the gender of the noun somewhere in their minds, as this information is important for formulating correct sentences when speaking – in Polish, for instance, adjectives and other words have to agree with the noun’s grammatical gender. I think we learn most about any system when consider how it behaves when under pressure. So for instance, I am looking at the processing of grammatical gender in Spanish-German bilinguals, as both Spanish and German have grammatical gender so they have to store two gender systems in their mental lexicon. I am also branching out to look at Lubukusu – a Bantu language spoken in Kenya. Bantu languages are known for having as many as 21 grammatical genders (or noun classes), which is a really interesting test case. I will be traveling to Kenya in August to present some of my early findings on this language at the World Congress of African Linguistics.

What is your most important scientific achievement or discovery? Why is it important?
My work on grammatical gender in language processing by heritage speakers of Polish and Spanish (Fuchs, 2021, 2022) suggests that, although heritage speakers sometimes make mistakes in using the correct gender agreement form in speech, during real-time language comprehension their processing patterns look like those of fully proficient Spanish/Polish speakers. This is a really important finding because it suggests that heritage speakers are much more like monolingual speakers in terms of their language abilities than we would have guessed if we judged based solely on language production. Given that there are so many heritage speakers in the US, this is really critical information in terms of understanding the linguistic abilities of such a huge chunk of the US population.

What are the biggest challenges you face in your scientific work?
One of the hardest things in my area of study is data collection. Data collection for eye-tracking studies is collected in-person, which means we have to find people who fit the characteristics we are looking for and who are willing to participate in a study. Living in southern California, there are many speakers of Spanish, but it is not always trivial to convince people to come to the university and participate in a study, as some find this to be quite intimidating. In addition, heritage speakers often don’t realize that we really are interested in them – many who email me to sign up for a study will first ask if it’s ok that they don’t speak Spanish perfectly, and I have to reassure them that yes in fact that’s exactly what we are hoping for. I am sure there are many more who don’t even email and so I don’t even get a chance to clarify. And of course on the flip side of this is the fact that finding heritage speakers of other languages in southern California can be more difficult. For instance, the Polish diaspora in the area is not particularly large, so I am currently looking for a researcher with access to a large Polish population somewhere in the US who might be willing to collaborate on a study I would like to run by heritage speakers of Polish.

What are the most important research questions that you plan to address in the near future? What developments do you see in your field?
As I mentioned before, I anticipate looking more closely at languages like Lubukusu that have many more grammatical genders than do European languages in which questions about grammatical gender, the mental lexicon, and language processing have been studied. Additionally, I am planning to look more at Polish, which has not only grammatical gender, but also has masculine „subgenders” (ex: mam nowy stół vs mam nowego psa).
More broadly in the field one of the things I’m seeing is that bilingualism is becoming much more prominent in linguistics, which traditionally focused on the language abilities of monolinguals. The focus on monolinguals was something Chomsky set out as an important aspect of linguistic research, and it has been very entrenched in the field. Historically understanding the language abilities of bilinguals was considered to be more a topic for applied linguists and language teachers who wanted to know how to more effectively teach second language. But now the field of linguistics is starting to understand the importance and urgency of investigating the language abilities of bilingualism – if our goal is to understand the human ability for language, and the fact is that more than half of the world’s population is bilingual, then restricting ourselves to studying monolinguals gives us a limited view.

Are there practical implications or potential applications of your research results? How do you see their impact on society or the economy?
Most of my work is primary research and does not have applications. However, I do hope that research on heritage speakers continues to pursue providing a fuller picture of what it means to be a heritage speaker. There are many heritage speakers in the US who are trying to “re-learn” their heritage language, taking classes to improve their language skills. Teachers of these classes who are informed about what scientists know about heritage speakers’ language systems can be equipped to create a more empowering learning environment, and might be able to leverage what heritage speakers do know / can do to more effectively help them target areas of weakness.

What advice would you give to young scientists at the threshold of their scientific careers?
I work with graduate students, and something I tell them is to seek feedback early and often. I have benefited so much from talking to others in the field about my work. Connecting with other researchers is an opportunity to come across something you may not have considered that will improve your work, or to learn how to frame your research in a more compelling way, or maybe to engage with someone who could be a future mentor or collaborator. I have found that if you approach others with openness, it can do wonders to the quality of your work and to the breadth of your research network.

Fot. Unsplash

Zuzanna Fuchs
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