The Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland is relatively young, having graduated its first PhDs in the early 1990s, and from its inception the department has been defined by an emphasis on understanding language as a system of the human mind. The department is currently unusual relative to others in its field. The faculty shows substantial methodological diversity (covering theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience), but the intellectual goals of the department are unusually cohesive. The department firmly believes that continued progress in understanding how the human mind/brain supports language will require a coordinated effort between experts in theoretical, experimental and computational linguistics.
The Department of Linguistics has 12 faculty, 35 PhD students, and around 100 undergraduate majors, plus a number of research staff, postdocs and visiting scholars at any time. The Maryland linguistics community includes many more people, due to close ties with psycholinguists in Hearing and Speech Sciences, second language acquisition experts in the School of Languages, computational linguists at UMIACS and the iSchool, linguists and others at the new Center for Advanced Study of Language, and neurolinguists at the National Institutes of Health. The department's research activities also include collaborations with experts on neuroscience and biological signal processing in Electrical and Computer Engineering, cognitive (neuro-)scientists in Psychology, Kinesiology, and Human Development, neuroscientists in Biology, Psychology, and the Institute for Systems Research, and cognitive scientists and logicians in Philosophy. Members of the Department of Linguistics are very active in the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) program.
These partnerships reflect the department's view of the collaborations that are necessary for future advances in the science of language, and the department's record of interdisciplinary collaboration is almost unique among linguistics departments in the United States. These efforts have recently been recognized by a $3 million IGERT award from the National Science Foundation for an interdisciplinary graduate program in Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity. More information on this and other cross-departmental initiatives can be found at the new Language at Maryland site.