Cynthia Lukyanenko

Cynthia Lukyanenko is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at George Mason University and Director of the Processing and Acquisition of Language at Mason (PALM) lab. Her research focuses on child language acquisition, morphology, morphosyntax, language variation, and real-time language comprehension.

• Education: BA in Linguistics from University of Maryland College Park; MA and PhD in Developmental Psychology from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Her work explores how children acquire morphosyntax and morphology in variable linguistic environments, extending to how adults process linguistic variation in real-time. Recent publications analyze negation dependencies, agreement patterns, and plural morphology in English and Spanish.

She has secured a $380k NSF Linguistics Research Grant (2023-2026) for a micro-comparative study of negation in American Englishes. Supervised PhD theses include studies on Arabic dialect perception and morphophonological cues in Arabic.

Her lab, PALM, investigates language processing and acquisition through experimental methods like eye-tracking. She teaches courses on research methods and language acquisition.