Growing up in Newport Beach, Frankie Boren was always intrigued by words. "As a child, I was very fascinated by language and stories and books and the power that language seemed to hold," she said. She noticed that certain vocabulary could elicit more intense reactions, arbitrary though they seemed at the time. She also noticed that language was a valuable tool, not just for direct communication but as a conduit of social connection.

As a teenager, however, severe trauma caused her to lose touch with language almost entirely. Between the ages of 15 and 16, Boren was assaulted multiple times, and the psychological effects were devastating. "I lost the ability to put thought into spoken word," she said. Something she had always taken for granted suddenly seemed inaccessible, no matter how hard she tried. It scared her.

"It was so strange and so awful," she said. "It plagued me for a long time."

It was also a profoundly alienating experience. "I stopped feeling like I could socialize normally because I couldn't articulate the contents of my own mind," she said.

As a junior in high school, Boren read a life-changing text for an exam: a portion of a chapter from Sylvia Plath's sole novel, The Bell Jar. "I was floored by how words on a page created something that was really visceral," she said. "I had lost what felt like the ability to connect to people around me, but I found that words on a page could reach inside me. That became a lifeline for me."

Still, literature never seemed like a sure thing to make a career out of. After graduating from high school, Boren studied English for a year at San Francisco State, but she didn't feel compelled to pursue the field. "Spending my days reading literature didn't really satisfy me," she said. After returning home from her stint in the Bay Area, she tried her hand at psychology while attending Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. "Psychology is also something I'm interested in, but I couldn't get away from a love of language," she said. In retrospect, she realizes that she had been trying to find a bridge between English and psychology.

In addition to taking classes, Boren spent much of her twenties working and dealing with the mental toll of the trauma she'd experienced, which dogged her footsteps. It was during these years that she learned how trauma affects the brain—an empowering revelation for her. "I thought it was just a character defect," she said of her struggles to communicate. "Honestly, I just thought something was wrong with me."

It also showed her that there were other ways to work with language besides getting an English degree. "I wasn’t content to study only what you could create with language. I’m just as curious, if not more so, about what the fundamental nature of language actually is and how it works, and why it works the way it does—like, what is this invisible thing that we are working with?" Having spent many years searching for her calling, Boren was delighted to discover the language science program at UCI.

"I have to spend my time and effort and money and life on things that I'm genuinely passionate about, and this is that thing," she says.

Taking her first linguistics class made her appreciate the fact that humans have the incredible capability for language in the first place. "I'm completely in awe of this amazing faculty that I, as a human, possess," she said. "It is something that I'm learning is so incredibly complex, with so many sophisticated factors involved."

Unsurprisingly, then, the interdisciplinary approach of the language science department suits her. Though she still has much to explore, having just started last fall, she's naturally become interested in psycholinguistics, which allows her to marry her interests in psychology and language. Along the way, she has appreciated the accessibility of faculty as she's gotten her footing here. "I really like that they're all engaged in research and clearly have so much excitement over the subject," she said. "It just makes a really fun learning environment, really friendly."

The same goes for her classmates, who share a sense of collaboration rather than competition. "There's a lot of curiosity here, a lot of good questions being asked, and that's really exciting," she said. "I'll really miss being surrounded by friendly, humble people who are devoted to knowledge and learning."

Although she's not set to graduate until the spring of 2026, she doesn't even want to think about that yet—she's only just found her happy place. "Learning about the nature of language has obliterated my former sense of insecurity about not being able to articulate myself in the ways I felt I should," she said.

"Now, I'm just grateful for the ability to speak at all—grateful for this amazing ability to participate in the fundamentally creative act that is language production. I live, now, with a sense of wonder and appreciation for all manifestations of language. That has completely changed how I see and interact with the world."

-Alison Van Houten for UCI Social Sciences
-photo by Luis Fonseca, UCI Social Sciences