Ph.D. in Language Science

About our Program

From a lensworthy location and culture of collaboration to field-shaping faculty and powerhouse programs, the reasons top students choose the UC Irvine School of Social Sciences for graduate study are many. Ranked among the top 10 best public colleges in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, UCI's new Ph.D. program in language science offers students five years of funding.

Scholars in the department seek answers to questions such as: How do children and adults learn language? How is language used strategically in social situations? How do the multiple languages spoken by a multilingual person interact in their brain? What explains the huge variety of languages we see in the world? How does the brain manage to coordinate the complex processes involved in speaking and hearing in real time, and how could we design computer systems to do the same thing?

UCI language science faculty publish regularly in top academic journals, and graduate students have ample opportunities to publish alongside them. Faculty and graduate students consistently present research at conferences and universities across the globe.

The program offers an integrative approach to the scientific study of language, exploring interfaces between traditional frameworks while fostering a more complete understanding of the human communication system. The aim is to train self-directed, successful researchers capable of innovative thinking at the forefront of language science. This training emphasizes empirical grounding, state-of-the-art methods for hypothesis generation and testing, and effective scientific communication.

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