About

Zuzanna Fuchs is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California and the director of the USC PoMMLab (Psycholinguistics of Mono- and Multilingualism Lab). Her research focuses on noun categorization systems, including grammatical gender, animacy, and noun classes. She employs formal and psycholinguistic methods to understand how noun category information is represented in the grammar, stored in the mental lexicon, and accessed during real-time processing of agreement. Her work targets both monolingual and bilingual speakers, especially heritage speakers, of languages with noun categorization systems. Her current research on noun classes in Lubukusu (a Bantu language) is funded by NSF Award #2438489, with co-investigators from USC and Moi University. In addition to her research, she serves as an Associate Editor for Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. Fuchs has been involved in various upcoming talks and has published recent work on topics such as gender processing in language, contributing to insights in psycholinguistics and language sciences. Her engagement with the academic community extends to media appearances and features, including interviews and profiles in various outlets, highlighting her role as a prominent researcher in her field.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cognitive psychology
• History
• Philosophy
• Pedagogy
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Morphosyntactic prediction and agreement attraction effects in Catalan-Spanish Aging Bilinguals

  Open MIND · 2026-01-10

  otherOpen access

  Predictive processing is central to efficient sentence comprehension (Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016; Pickering & Gambi, 2018), allowing the brain to anticipate upcoming linguistic information. Prediction can occur at the lexical level, anticipating specific words (DeLong et al., 2005; Brothers et al., 2021), or at the morphosyntactic level, anticipating features such as gender or number, which facilitates real-time grammatical integration (Van Berkum et al., 2005; Wicha et al., 2004). Aging may reduce predictive efficiency due to declines in working memory and executive control (Federmeier & Kutas, 2005; Payne & Stine-Morrow, 2014), yet accumulated linguistic experience—particularly in bilingual adults—may mitigate these effects and support sustained prediction (Kaan, 2014; Beatty-Martínez & Dussias, 2017). Older adults show reduced sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations and greater susceptibility to agreement attraction errors (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were…) (Reifegerste et al., 2017; Cano-Sánchez, 2025), linked to changes in maintaining morphosyntactic expectations and inhibitory control. Despite growing interest in morphosyntactic processing across the lifespan (Reifegerste et al., 2020), it remains unclear how lifelong bilingual experience interacts with aging, particularly in closely related language pairs like Catalan and Spanish. The present study addresses this question using a self-paced sentence reading task based on the agreement attraction paradigm (Bock & Miller, 1991; Wagers et al., 2009). Participants will include younger bilingual and monolingual adults aged 18–34 and older bilingual and monolingual adults aged 60 years and above. They will read sentences in which the subject either matches or mismatches the number of a plural verb and includes an attractor noun that is either congruent or incongruent, followed by comprehension questions. Participants will also complete a cognitive and linguistic battery (working memory: RSPAN, Keep Track; executive control: Stroop; linguistic experience: BEST, reading habits questionnaire) to explore how individual differences modulate morphosyntactic prediction and agreement computation. This design will clarify how older bilingual adults maintain or adjust predictive mechanisms and agreement attraction effects based on cognitive resources and language experience during sentence comprehension.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Morphosyntactic prediction and agreement attraction effects in Catalan-Spanish Aging Bilinguals

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-02-06

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Predictive processing is central to efficient sentence comprehension (Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016; Pickering & Gambi, 2018), allowing the brain to anticipate upcoming linguistic information. Prediction can occur at the lexical level, anticipating specific words (DeLong et al., 2005; Brothers et al., 2021), or at the morphosyntactic level, anticipating features such as gender or number, which facilitates real-time grammatical integration (Van Berkum et al., 2005; Wicha et al., 2004). Aging may reduce predictive efficiency due to declines in working memory and executive control (Federmeier & Kutas, 2005; Payne & Stine-Morrow, 2014), yet accumulated linguistic experience—particularly in bilingual adults—may mitigate these effects and support sustained prediction (Kaan, 2014; Beatty-Martínez & Dussias, 2017). Older adults show reduced sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations and greater susceptibility to agreement attraction errors (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were…) (Reifegerste et al., 2017; Cano-Sánchez, 2025), linked to changes in maintaining morphosyntactic expectations and inhibitory control. Despite growing interest in morphosyntactic processing across the lifespan (Reifegerste et al., 2020), it remains unclear how lifelong bilingual experience interacts with aging, particularly in closely related language pairs like Catalan and Spanish. The present study addresses this question using a self-paced sentence reading task based on the agreement attraction paradigm (Bock & Miller, 1991; Wagers et al., 2009). Participants will include younger bilingual and monolingual adults aged 18–34 and older bilingual and monolingual adults aged 60 years and above. They will read sentences in which the subject either matches or mismatches the number of a plural verb and includes an attractor noun that is either congruent or incongruent, followed by comprehension questions. Participants will also complete a cognitive and linguistic battery (working memory: RSPAN, Keep Track; executive control: Stroop; linguistic experience: BEST, reading habits questionnaire) to explore how individual differences modulate morphosyntactic prediction and agreement computation. This design will clarify how older bilingual adults maintain or adjust predictive mechanisms and agreement attraction effects based on cognitive resources and language experience during sentence comprehension.

  Publisher

• When gender meets number: facilitative processing of one vs. two features on Spanish definite articles

  Frontiers in Language Sciences · 2026-04-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Research on real-time language comprehension has shown that speakers of various language backgrounds can use a pre-nominal morphosyntactic cue to facilitate the lexical retrieval of an upcoming noun. The present study takes the next step in this domain, investigating facilitative processing when two morphosyntactic cues to the target noun are available: gender and number. We conduct an eye-tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm, and we compare baseline and heritage speakers to determine how language experience modulates the relative weighting of multiple cues. We find evidence of facilitative processing of plural articles for both groups, not only when both features are informative cues to the target, but also when only one of the features is informative. This suggests that listeners access each morphosyntactic feature independently, which is a particularly noteworthy finding for the heritage group, who have been argued not to do so in prior offline studies. However, we find that language experience impacts the relative weighting of the two cues. When gender and number are compatible with different competitors and are thus in direct conflict, baseline speakers shift more to gender competitors, whereas heritage speakers do not. Additionally, when each feature uniquely identifies the target, in some contexts baseline speakers may attend to only the gender feature, whereas heritage speakers may attend to only the number feature. Taken together, these results suggest that baseline speakers may weight abstract grammatical gender more strongly, while heritage speakers may rely more on the semantically salient feature.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• (Frontiers) When gender meets number: facilitative processing of one versus two features on Spanish definite articles

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-03-17

  other
  Publisher

• Do heritage speakers work harder in their heritage language? A dual task study of cognitive effort in bilingual language processing

  Bilingualism Language and Cognition · 2026-05-11

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This study tests the relative amount of cognitive effort required for Spanish language processing by L1-dominant speakers (Spanish-raised bilinguals, SRBs), heritage speakers (HSs) and late second-language learners (English-raised bilinguals, ERBs). In a dual-task study, three groups of bilingual Spanish speakers were presented concurrently with a linguistic and non-linguistic task, each at three levels of difficulty. When responding to the non-linguistic task, which required concurrently processing and encoding in memory a Spanish-language phrase, SRBs were, on average, most accurate and ERBs least accurate. This suggests a three-way difference between SRBs, HSs and ERBs in the amount of cognitive resources required for language processing in the target language, highlighting HSs’ unique developmental trajectory. Results further suggest that accuracy on the non-linguistic task was reduced for all groups when the concurrent linguistic stimulus was of higher syntactic complexity, suggesting that more complex linguistic structures require more cognitive resources regardless of language background.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Masculine animate as a subgender of masculine in Polish: Evidence from psycholinguistics

  Journal of Slavic linguistics · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  abstract: This paper investigates grammatical gender and animacy distinctions in Polish. Differences in agreement morphology between masculine animate nouns and masculine inanimate nouns have long motivated debates regarding the number of gender categories in Polish. The present paper contributes to this discussion from the perspective of psycholinguistics. Evidence from native Polish speakers' gaze patterns collected during an eyetracking study using the Visual World Paradigm suggests that, during real-time language processing, when speakers hear an adjective suffixed with the masculine animate accusative morpheme - ego , this activates a masculine gender feature and an independent animacy feature. This constitutes evidence in support of treating gender and animacy as independent noun categorization systems in Polish.

  PublisherDOI

• Similarity-Based Interference in the Processing of Classifier-Noun Dependencies in Mandarin Chinese

  2025-09-09

  articleOpen access

  During the processing of linguistic dependencies, the presence of a non-dependent word—referred to as a distractor—can sometimes complicate the identification of the correct subject. This phenomenon, known as similarity-based interference, provides a valuable testing ground for competing theories of sentence processing and has garnered significant interest in the field of psycholinguistics. One prominent theory, cue-based retrieval, suggests that the parser initiates a search for the relevant linguistic dependent at the retrieval site (e.g., the verb) based on a set of retrieval cues. In this work, we explore the use of lexicon-specific cues set by classifiers in the retrieval of noun dependents in Mandarin Chinese to provide evidence for the cue-based retrieval mechanism. A further open question is whether the distractor must intervene between the co-dependents (so-called retroactive interference) or whether the distractor can appear to the left of the dependent elements (so-called proactive interference). Previous work has suggested that proactive interference is weaker than retroactive interference, i.e., that the distractor has to intervene between the co-dependents to influence the dependency completion process. Using self-paced reading and A-Maze tasks, and Bayes Factors for hypothesis testing, we found robust evidence for a predicted interference effect in retroactive configurations, but no interference in proactive configurations. We discuss the theoretical implications of the current work for theories of retrieval and sentence processing in general.

  PublisherDOI

• Using MoTR to Probe Agreement Processing in Russian

  Universität Zürich, ZORA · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  One important distinction in the syntax literature is between agreement that is external to the nominal phrase and agreement that is internal to it (sometimes called concord). How this type of agreement impacts sentence processing, however, is not well understood. In this paper, we ask whether agreement errors are processed differently based on their internal vs. external status. We investigate this question in Russian, a Slavic language that has a rich morphological agreement system and flexible word order, allowing us to control for several confounds. Our results are not fully conclusive but do provide moderate evidence that processing of agreement is modulated by internal vs. external status. We measure real-time language processing using Mouse Tracking for Reading (MoTR), a new web-deployable measurement tool that has been argued to improve over previous methods (e.g., self-paced reading) but has so far been tested only in English, and never for agreement processing phenomena. We find that MoTR can successfully pick up differences in our factorized psycholinguistic experiment in Russian, validating MoTR as a reliable tool for investigating agreement (error) processing. A direct comparison with existing data collected using in-lab eye-tracking-while-reading with similar experimental materials (Fuchs et al., 2025) suggests MoTR data yields larger effect sizes than does eye-tracking data.

  PublisherDOI

• Measuring Adult Heritage Language Lexical Proficiency for Studies on Facilitative Processing of Gender

  Languages · 2025-08-04 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The present study analyzes individual differences in the facilitative processing of grammatical gender by heritage speakers of Spanish, asking whether these differences correlate with lexical proficiency. Results from an eye-tracking study in the Visual World Paradigm replicate prior findings that, as a group, heritage speakers of Spanish show facilitative processing of gender. Importantly, in a follow-up within-group analysis, we test whether three measures of lexical proficiency—oral picture-naming, verbal fluency, and LexTALE—predict individual performance. We find that lexical proficiency, as measured by LexTALE, predicts overall word recognition; however, we observe no effects of the other measures and no evidence that lexical proficiency modulates the strength of the facilitative effect. Our results highlight the importance of carefully selecting tools for proficiency assessment in experimental studies involving heritage speakers, underscoring that the absence of evidence for an effect of proficiency based on a single measure should not be taken as evidence of absence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Independent processing of lexical features on portmanteau morphemes: evidence from Polish

  Language Cognition and Neuroscience · 2025-04-15 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Maria Polinsky

  12 shared

• Gregory Scontras

  University of California, Irvine

  8 shared

• Scontras. Gregory

  IIT@Harvard

  6 shared

• Jenneke van der Wal

  Leiden University

  2 shared

• María Luisa Parra

  1 shared

• Rajiv Rao

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  1 shared

• María Polinsky

  1 shared

• Wenqi Zeng

  University of Iowa

  1 shared

Labs

• PoMMLabPI

  Students

Awards & honors

• NSF Award #2438489