Linguistics: child language acquisition, morphology, morphosyntax, language variation, real-time language comprehension
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 children's acquisition of morphology and morphosyntax, and teaches courses on research methods and language acquisition.
Her research has explored 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.
She earned her BA in Linguistics from the University of Maryland College Park, and her MA and PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before coming to Mason, she conducted postdoctoral research in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at Penn State.
Lukyanenko, C., & Miller, K. (2023). A corpus analysis of variable agreement in child and caregiver English. Language Variation and Change. [link]
Blanchette, F. & Lukyanenko, C. (2019). Unacceptable grammar? An eye-tracking study of English Negative Concord. Language and Cognition. [link]
Lukyanenko, C., & Fisher, C. (2016). Where are the cookies? 2- and 3-year-olds use number-marked verbs to anticipate upcoming nouns. Cognition 146, 349-370. [link]
Lukyanenko, C., Conroy, A., & Lidz, J. (2014). Is she patting Katie? Constraints on pronominal reference in 30-month-olds. Language Learning and Development 10(4), 328-344. [link]
Amal Alotaibi, Perception of Regional Spoken Arabic By Native Speakers (2024)
Hind Aldakheelallah, The Use of Morphophonological Cues in Noun Processing: The Case of the Arabic Definite Article (2023)