Sign Language Studies最新文献

• A Linguist Informs Deaf Education with Sign Language Research
• Ronnie B. Wilbur (bio)

In 1970, as a graduate student in linguistics (theoretical phonology, typology) at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), I needed a job and was hired by Professor Stephen P. Quigley in the Special Education Department to manage a huge federally funded project investigating problems that deaf children had learning English. I got the job because I already had extensive experience programming computers to conduct large-scale data analysis and familiarity with morphophonological structures in multiple Native American, African, and Austronesian languages.

When Quigley told me that deaf children had problems learning English due to interference from sign language, my first research program emerged: proving him wrong. I already knew from psycholinguistics class that less than 20 percent of second language learning errors could be attributed to the first language (work by Dulay and Burt 1974). Given that the grammatical structure of what we now call American Sign Language (ASL) was virtually unknown, this meant that the focus of my research was to find explanations for the remaining errors observed in deaf children's written language. This led to a series of eleven publications from 1973 to 1989 focused specifically on providing explanations for difficulties with different syntactic structures of English (verbs, conjunctions, pronouns, determiners, [End Page 275] relative clauses, etc.). During the course of this project, I met many people involved in the Deaf education field and four important sign language research founders, colleagues, and friends: Ursula Bellugi (who visited us in Illinois), Edward Klima (when I visited them in La Jolla), Robert Hoffmeister (who was involved in data collection for the project while he was a graduate student in Minnesota), and William Stokoe in connection with Sign Language Studies.

In 1971, I presented the first project paper at the (then) American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) in Chicago, in what became a string of thirty-one presentations over twenty-two straight years, as I attempted to convince professionals in communication disorders, speech pathology, and audiology that knowledge of sign language was not the source of deaf students' difficulties with English. The response from ASHA was very positive (not so much the A. G. Bell Association) and is likely the reason I am currently half in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and half in the Department of Linguistics at Purdue. Around the same time, in 1973 at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) conference in San Diego, there was a special session on "Language of the Deaf," chaired by Ursula Bellugi, in which I present

• A Conversation among Four Deaf Linguists
• Benjamin Bahan (bio), Carol Padden (bio), Ted Supalla (bio), and Lars Wallin (bio)

In October of 2022, the four of us—Ben Bahan, Carol Padden, Ted Supalla, and Lars Wallin—began a series of free-ranging conversations about how we built our linguistic careers as the new field of sign language studies was dawning. We were among those deaf scientists who wrote our doctoral dissertations on sign language structure after the 1965 publication of the Dictionary of the American Sign Language by William Stokoe, Dorothy Casterline, and Carl Croneberg. Ted Supalla received his PhD in 1982, and his dissertation was one of the first on the structure of American Sign Language (ASL). Carol followed in 1983, also completing a dissertation on ASL structure. Lars Wallin completed his in 1994 on Swedish Sign Language (SSL) and Ben Bahan, two years later in 1996, adding to the growing number of dissertations on ASL. Carol, Ben, and Ted were PhD students at American universities (UC San Diego and Boston University), while Lars completed his PhD at Stockholm University. Throughout our conversation, we compared notes about doctoral studies in the United States and Europe.

We held three video conversations over a period of two months. After the second conversation, we decided to focus on three key questions: [End Page 290]

Lars Wallin and Carol Padden (top row) with Ben Bahan and Ted Supalla (bottom row) in their 2022 Zoom conversation.

1. 1. How did we choose to enter the field of linguistics and the study of human language and cognition?

2. 2. How did we build our careers, beginning with our PhD training, given that there were almost no deaf or hearing models of how to be a sign language linguist?

3. 3. What challenges do we see still ahead for young deaf scholars planning their own careers in science?

What follows is extracted from a transcription of our signed conversation, edited for continuity and clarity—as well as keeping us on track. It was amusing, but also sobering, when we looked back at our early struggles to become scientists. We labored to make connections between what we learned about spoken languages to what we intuitively understood about our sign languages. There were few publications we could read about ASL, SSL, or any other sign language, and even fewer tools for deep analysis of sign language structure. More fundamentally, we had no deaf models for who we were trying to become. Looking back, we now see more clearly than we did as young students that our hearing advisors and mentors—some of whom are now deceased—likewise had few models for h

• A Tale of Sign Language Dictionary Making in the Netherlands
• Trude Schermer (bio)

How It Started

It was a beautiful fall afternoon in 1977 when I walked into one of the classrooms of the University of Amsterdam located in the Oudemanhuispoort. I was twenty-two, a student of Dutch language and literature about to start a second major, general linguistics.

One of my first introductions to this new field was a lecture by Professor Bernard Tervoort. As one of the founders of the new department, he was well known for his research on the communication of deaf children in the Netherlands (Tervoort 1953). He could also captivate his audience with numerous stories about his research from both the Netherlands and the United States.

His lecture was about the strictly oral education of deaf children in the Netherlands.

The main priority within deaf education in the Netherlands for almost a century was for deaf pupils to become—as much as possible—hearing people. The main focus in deaf education was therefore on learning how to speak and lipread. There was no mention at all, of course, of sign language being used. This has had consequences for the status of sign language, in the eyes of both deaf and hearing people: a sign language did not exist in a linguistic sense in the Netherlands, despite the fact that deaf people around the schools for the deaf have been using sign language at least since 1790, when the [End Page 464] first school for the deaf was established in Groningen by Henri Daniël Guyot (Betten 1990).

Tervoort's lecture would shape my plans for the future. I was taken aback by the fact that deaf pupils were not allowed to use their language in schools, that their teachers were all hearing who did not understand signing, and that their spoken language development was very much delayed compared to their hearing peers. I was puzzled. Catherine Snow, an American professor of language development at the Department of General Linguistics had told us about the importance of early mother-child interaction for the development of language. Would this not apply to deaf children as well?

In the same period, a new director was appointed at the Dutch Foundation for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Child (NSDSK),¹ Truus van der Lem.² She was also puzzled by the fact that parents were not allowed to use signing with their children, given the poor results of deaf education at that time (Conrad 1979) and decided to start working together with the University of Amsterdam. The collaboration opened up research possibilities for master's students, which made it possible for me to study communication between hearing mothers and their deaf babies using video.

During this process, I had more and more questions and fewer