Zuzanna Fuchs ’13

Even before she decided on a career, linguist Zuzanna Fuchs ’13 had a special connection to language. Growing up in Michigan speaking Polish and English, she was familiar with navigating her own bilingualism. But a linguistics class with Associate Professor John McWhorter helped connect the dots that would shape her future.

“I didn’t realize that I would be learning about language as a human ability, and it turns out it was something I really connected with based on my own experience,” Fuchs says. “The fact that I could study this topic formally, that there’s a science to it — that really drew me in.”

Fuchs now teaches similar linguistics classes herself as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. She also researches speakers with experiences similar to her own — typically those who grew up using one language with their families (what’s called a heritage language) and another outside their homes. Fuchs was one of the first to investigate how these speakers understand their non-dominant language using eye-tracking methods. This millisecond-by-millisecond approach gives more insight into how her research participants rely on context clues to anticipate what someone is going to say in conversations where they might not know every word.

“Even though on the surface heritage speakers are quite different [from homeland speakers], when it comes down to these automatic, subconscious processes, heritage speakers look a lot like their homeland equivalents,” she says. “It really was quite a breakthrough.”

Fuchs envisions that her research might help people who no longer speak their heritage language as frequently but are looking to reconnect. A fuller understanding of their cognitive processing could help better serve heritage speakers looking for tailored language instruction.

“When you think about relearning the language, it could be helpful to frame it as the knowledge already being there, but you have to dig it up rather than starting from zero,” Fuchs says.

— Emily Driehaus