معرفی
Zuzanna Fuchs is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California (USC) and director of the Psycholinguistics of Mono- and Multilingualism Lab (PoMMLab). Her research focuses on noun categorization systems—including grammatical gender, animacy, and noun classes—using formal and psycholinguistic methods to investigate how these categories are represented in grammar, stored in the mental lexicon, and accessed during real-time agreement processing. She studies both monolingual and bilingual speakers, with a particular emphasis on heritage speakers.
Her work integrates experimental methods like eye-tracking and the Visual World Paradigm to explore linguistic phenomena in Polish, Russian, Turkish, and Spanish. Key research areas include the processing of agreement features, morphological decomposition in heritage languages, and the interplay between grammatical and semantic factors in real-time language processing.
Upcoming presentations include a plenary talk at the 2025 Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics conference and a panel discussion at the 16th Heritage Language Research Institute. Her research has been featured in media outlets such as LAist’s AirTalk and USC Dornsife News.
As lab director, Fuchs oversees studies on language acquisition, bilingualism, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying linguistic representation. Her lab actively engages participants in studies exploring noun categorization systems and heritage language maintenance.
