Winter Storm Talk - Cynthia Lukyanenko (George Mason)
Winter Storm Talk - Cynthia Lukyanenko (George Mason)
Hear from Cynthia Lukyanenko at Winter Storm, the Language Science Center's multi-day winter event. Click here to learn more about Winter Storm 2026.
Exploring the psycholinguistics of syntactic variation
Abstract: Language varies both within and between individuals. Sociolinguistic research shows that language users have extensive knowledge of the social significance of variation in their communities, but how is linguistic knowledge of variation structured, acquired and used? In this talk, I discuss two lines of work that contribute to understanding the structure and source of language users’ knowledge of syntactic variation. One explores Mainstream US English users’ comprehension and processing of negative concord structures (e.g., I didn’t say nothing ‘I said nothing’). The other explores children’s acquisition of variable and categorical patterns in English subject-verb agreement (e.g., there’s flowers, flowers are pretty).
About: Cynthia Lukyanenko is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at George Mason University and the Director of Processing and Acquisition of Language at Mason (PALM). She studies adults' and children's use of morphological and morphosyntactic cues during comprehension, and teaches courses on research methods and language acquisition.
Her research has explored adults' and preschoolers’ knowledge of plural morphology, subject-verb agreement, and constraints on pronoun coreference. In recent work, she explores how children's acquisition of these aspects of language changes if the input they receive is variable, and how linguistic variation influences adults' real-time comprehension.
Before coming to Mason, she conducted postdoctoral research in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at Penn State. She earned her MA and PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and before that, her BA in Linguistics from the University of Maryland College Park.