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Winter Storm - Cynthia Lukyanenko / Exploring the psycholinguistics of syntactic variation

Cynthia Lukyanenko

Winter Storm - Cynthia Lukyanenko / Exploring the psycholinguistics of syntactic variation

Linguistics Friday, January 23, 2026 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Friday January 22, Maryland alumna Cynthia Lukyanenko '08, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at George Mason University, joins Winter Storm to discuss her work on "Exploring the psycholinguistics of syntactic variation," abstracted below.

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).

Add to Calendar 01/23/26 11:00:00 01/23/26 12:00:00 America/New_York Winter Storm - Cynthia Lukyanenko / Exploring the psycholinguistics of syntactic variation

Friday January 22, Maryland alumna Cynthia Lukyanenko '08, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at George Mason University, joins Winter Storm to discuss her work on "Exploring the psycholinguistics of syntactic variation," abstracted below.

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).

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