Linguistics is the study of human language, encompassing particular languages and properties common to all languages. Areas of interest include: phonetics and phonology, the study of the sounds and sound patternings in human languages, morphology, the study of the structure and formation of words, syntax, the study of the structure and patterning of words and phrases in sentences, semantics, the study of the nature of meaning, neurolinguistics, the study of how language is stored and processed in the brain, psycholinguistics, the study of how language is processed and acquired by young children, pragmatics, the principles which characterize language use in communication, sociolinguistics, the study of language in society, and computational linguistics, the computational modeling of linguistic knowledge, structure, and processing. Students majoring in second languages, English, education, pre-law, pre-medicine, and other social sciences also find linguistics course work valuable.