While the natural world has produced many remarkable communication systems, human languages are unique in their expressive capacity and flexibility. Most species are able to communicate a small finite set of context dependent meanings, but language users know tens of thousands of unique words and are able to put them together to produce a vast array of meanings. Other animals communicate to request, demand or inform, while humans use language for a much wider range of purposes - to persuade, to instruct, to enchant. The Language Acquisition concentration area educates students in the best answers researchers have to date, and provides training in the methods required to make their own contribution to solving what is one of the most difficult and most fascinating problems in all of science. All students interested in concentrating in this area will be expected to take courses in Language Acquisition (LIN 393) and Experimental Design and Statistical Inference (EDP 482K) or Advanced Statistics: Inferential (PSY 384M). The department also regularly offers a course on Bilingual Language Acquisition and specialist seminars on topics related to human language learning and processing.