Introducing Cynthia Lukyanenko, New Adjunct Assistant Professor of Linguistics

This fall, Cynthia Lukyanenko joins us as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Linguistics, teaching Research Methods and First Language Acquisition. Her research focuses on children’s acquisition of first language morphology and morphosyntax, and has included studies exploring preschoolers’ knowledge of plural morphology, subject-verb agreement, and constraints on pronoun coreference. This research has taken her through an assortment of departments: she earned a BA in Linguistics from the University of Maryland College Park, a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and then spent a few years as a postdoctoral research in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at Penn State. When she’s not being a linguist, psycholinguist, or general language nerd, she’s probably out hiking or birding or both.