Can babies be diagnosed earlier with language disorders? Can we close the education gap through advances in literacy? Can we make technology communicate with us across languages? Answering these questions requires an understanding of the unique properties of the human brain. With your financial support, the new Maryland Language Science Center will seek to solve important language problems and will train future leaders who can traverse such diverse areas as linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, engineering and education. This collaborative effort brings together more than 200 researchers from 17 departments and centers and six colleges. It's the first time anywhere that a university is working to combine the diverse elements of language science in this way.