A programmatic powerhouse. Full financial aid and funding. A lens-worthy location. The reasons students choose the UC Irvine School of Social Sciences for their graduate pursuits are many.

Ranked as the #10 best public college in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, UCI's new Ph.D. program in language science offers students five years of guaranteed 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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Students work with faculty advisors using innovative technologies in quantitative, neuroscientific, and behavioral approaches to scientific inquiry. Training incorporates curricular flexibility, technical communication skills development, and prioritization of research early in the graduate career.

Special attention is given to providing hands-on research experience and equipping students with sophisticated quantitative methods and technical communication skills. This allows students to target a broad range of careers within academia (as research professors, research scientists, and teaching professors) and in industry (as language engineers, knowledge engineers, language analysts, social media analysts, computational linguists, speech scientists, and educational technologists). Expertise in languages other than English makes graduates even more competitive for industry and government positions.

And if that wasn't enough, the UCI campus is located less than 10 miles from Newport Beach, is the #1 university doing the most for the American dream (New York Times College Access Index), the #2 "coolest school" in the nation (Sierra magazine), and the #9 best value university (Princeton Review).