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.
We next examined production strategies in describing ongoing events (Gussow & MacDonald, 2026), inspired by sportscasters who narrate rapid, unpredictable events in real-time. Participants described videos of motion events (e.g., a butterfly flying towards a slide), and we manipulated whether the goal (e.g., the slide) was known from the start of the trial, or ambiguous until the event concluded. We found that participants began speaking with limited message information – while the event was ongoing and its outcome still uncertain. Although this strategy allowed them to begin speaking sooner, it resulted in longer word durations and more silent pauses, as they planned upcoming material while speaking. Moreover, in a cross-linguistic comparison between Spanish and English, we found that speakers adapt their strategies to the word order of the language: in English, the uncertain part of the message had to be produced early in the utterance, causing later response times and more disfluencies; while in Spanish it could be postponed – allowing speakers to begin speaking early and fluently even when uncertainty remains.
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, making it important to understand how it varies with language experience.