LANGUAGE PRODUCTION UNDER UNCERTAINTY
One line of my work focuses on language production under uncertainty: asking if, how, and when speakers begin planning their utterances when they are still uncertain about the message they would like to convey.
To start answering these questions, I developed a novel picture-description paradigm that manipulates how much information participants have about their message, and consequently, how much of their utterance they can plan. In a preliminary study, we found that uncertainty affects speakers’ word order, as they prioritize message components that are certain to be useful and place them first in the utterance (Gussow & MacDonald, 2023). Moreover, this strategy allows speakers to begin production sooner, and they can continue planning the rest of the utterance incrementally, as more information becomes available.
Follow-up work aims to expand these investigations to event descriptions: events unfold visually over time, creating temporary ambiguity about the message. We are also extending the paradigm a cross-linguistic study, taking advantage of the different ordering of adjective-noun phrases in Spanish versus English to see how speakers of each language mitigate the challenge of uncertainty. The asymmetry between what can be planned first versus what can be produced first creates an interesting context for production under uncertainty, and it is unclear whether early planning would always be beneficial.
PLANNING PARALLELS IN LANGUAGE AND MOTOR ACTION
Language and action planning are typically studied separately, with little cross-talk between researchers. But there are several parallels between the two domains, particularly because both require a hierarchical plan and sequencing of sub-goals en route to an overarching goal. In this project, I collaborate with researchers from Penn State to uncover parallels in planning principles between language and action. For example, we show how producers in both domains reuse components of prior plans when planning new ones (Lebkuecher et al., 2022), and that structurally analogous sequences yield similar error patterns across domains (Gussow et al., 2023). Findings from these comparisons not only benefit the research on each domain individually, but also contribute to our understanding of domain-general principles in production and cognition more generally.
PREDICTIVE
COMPREHENSION
In prior work during my Master’s degree, I used eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm to investigate predictive processing during Spanish sentence comprehension. We found that although comprehenders initially use the semantic context of a sentence to predict upcoming words, they can rapidly adjust their predictions based on grammatical gender cues. However, the sentence context still affects integration of the target word, suggesting a lingering effect of the initial prediction (Gussow et al., 2019). I later continued this line of work with Yuzhe Gu, my undergraduate mentee at UW-Madison, whose senior thesis used a mouse-tracking paradigm to show that native English speakers use phonological cues (a versus an) to predict upcoming words, but nonnative speakers (L1 Mandarin–L2 English) are less sensitive to these cues. Predictive processing is now central to language comprehension theories, and understanding its role and operations–in both native and nonnative processing–is crucial for refining current comprehension models.