• The Beginnings of Research on British Sign Language
• Bencie Woll (bio)

I was always fascinated as a child with language: I was New York City champion in the National Spelling Bee competition and spent one summer trying to teach myself Latin from a school textbook; by the age of thirteen, I had decided that I would study linguistics at university (although I didn't have a very clear idea of what linguistics actually was). After obtaining a BA and MA in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, I moved to England to do an MA in linguistics and stayed on there as I started my academic career in the mid-1970s as a postgraduate researcher at the School of Education Research Unit at Bristol University, working on a project directed by Gordon Wells that was investigating language acquisition in a large sample of hearing children acquiring English as a native language. The project provided opportunities to explore language and communication from a systemic linguistic perspective, including research on interaction and communicative function as well as grammatical development.

The mid-1970s also saw the beginnings of interest in sign language in Britain. In a seminal paper published in 1975, entitled "Can Deaf Children Acquire Language?" Mary Brennan, a trainer of teachers of the deaf at Moray House College in Edinburgh, proposed for the first time that the terms British Sign Language and BSL be used to describe British Deaf people's use of sign. At the same time, Reuben Conrad was undertaking his influential project looking at the poor language and literacy achievements of deaf teens (Conrad 1979); both [End Page 350]

Bencie Woll sharing research findings at a British Deaf Association conference in the 1980s.

Mary and Conrad challenged the assumptions that had underpinned the exclusive use of spoken languages in deaf education from the late nineteenth century. In 1977, Jim Kyle, a psychologist who had been the postdoc on Conrad's research project, joined the team at the Bristol Research Unit and began to develop plans for a new research project looking at cognitive and linguistic processes in BSL, while at the same time Mary established the Edinburgh BSL Project to carry out research into the grammar of BSL. These were great times for the development of BSL research: Dorothy Miles, the deaf Welsh poet and actor who had worked for many years in the United States with Klima and Bellugi, had just returned to live in the United Kingdom, while Margaret Deuchar was at Stanford University doing a PhD on diglossia in BSL (the first-ever PhD on BSL). Margaret continued to work on BSL for several years, but after some time moved into research focused more generally on sociolinguistics and bilingualism.

As one of the few linguists in the Research Unit in Bristol at that time, I was asked by Jim Kyle to comment on a draft of his research proposal. I was immediately taken with the idea of doing research on a language about which so little was known—and about which there would be opportunities to do original research on a variety of topics and subtopics—in contrast to child language acquisition research, [End Page 351] which I felt at that time had already become very specialized and narrowly focused. So, I decided that I would like to switch to doing sign language research and applied to join Jim's research team in 1978. Of course, I didn't know sign language and knew very little about BSL or the British deaf community. Jim also didn't have a great deal of BSL skill, but we worked closely with Peter Llewellyn-Jones, who was based at the Bristol Deaf Club and who was a BSL "missioner to the Deaf" (a now-extinct profession which combined the roles of social worker and interpreter).¹ We were aware of the gaps in our knowledge, and once the project was funded, these gaps were rapidly addressed by the inclusion of several native signing deaf researchers in our research team: first Gloria Pullen, then Jennifer Ackerman, Lorna Allsop, and Linda Day.

At that time, the recognition by all of the...

• 英国手语研究的开端
• 本西·沃尔（个人简介）

当我还是个孩子的时候，我就一直对语言着迷：我是全国拼字比赛纽约市的冠军，并花了一个夏天的时间试图从学校教科书中自学拉丁语；十三岁时，我决定在大学学习语言学（尽管我不太清楚语言学到底是什么）。在宾夕法尼亚大学获得语言学学士和硕士学位后，我搬到英国攻读语言学硕士学位，并留在那里，在 20 世纪 70 年代中期开始我的学术生涯，在教育学院研究室担任研究生研究员在布里斯托大学，从事由戈登·威尔斯指导的一个项目，该项目正在研究大量以英语为母语的听力正常儿童的语言习得情况。该项目提供了从系统语言学角度探索语言和交流的机会，包括互动和交际功能以及语法发展的研究。

20 世纪 70 年代中期，英国也开始对手语产生兴趣。1975 年发表的一篇开创性论文，题为“聋哑儿童能否获得语言？” 爱丁堡莫里豪斯学院聋人教师培训师玛丽·布伦南首次提出用“英国手语”和“BSL”这两个术语来描述英国聋人对手语的使用。与此同时，鲁本·康拉德 (Reuben Conrad) 正在进行他的一项颇具影响力的项目，研究聋哑青少年在语言和识字方面的不良成就（Conrad 1979）；两者[完页 350]

Bencie Woll 在 20 世纪 80 年代的英国聋人协会会议上分享研究成果。

玛丽和康拉德对 19 世纪末以来聋人教育中仅使用口语的假设提出了挑战。1977 年，曾担任康拉德研究项目博士后的心理学家吉姆·凯尔 (Jim Kyle) 加入了布里斯托尔研究中心的团队，并开始为一个新的研究项目制定计划，该项目着眼于 BSL 的认知和语言过程，同时玛丽成立了爱丁堡 BSL 项目，对 BSL 语法进行研究。这是 BSL 研究发展的伟大时期：在美国与 Klima 和 Bellugi 一起工作多年的聋哑威尔士诗人和演员 Dorothy Miles 刚刚回到英国生活，而 Margaret Deuchar 则在美国工作。斯坦福大学在 BSL 领域攻读双语博士学位（有史以来第一个 BSL 博士学位）。玛格丽特继续研究 BSL 几年，但一段时间后转向更广泛地关注社会语言学和双语的研究。

作为当时布里斯托尔研究中心为数不多的语言学家之一，吉姆·凯尔请我对他的研究提案草案发表评论。我立即产生了对一种人们知之甚少的语言进行研究的想法，与儿童语言习得研究相比，这种语言将有机会对各种主题和子主题进行原创研究，[结束页] 351]我当时觉得它已经变得非常专业和狭隘。于是，我决定转行做手语研究，并于1978年申请加入吉姆的研究团队。当然，我不懂手语，对BSL或英国聋人群体知之甚少。吉姆也没有很高的 BSL 技能，但我们与彼得·卢埃林-琼斯密切合作，他在布里斯托尔聋人俱乐部工作，是 BSL“聋人传教士”（一种现已灭绝的职业，结合了社会工作者和口译员的角色）。¹我们意识到我们知识上的差距，项目获得资助后，我们的研究团队中加入了几位本土手语聋人研究人员，这些差距很快得到了解决：首先是格洛丽亚·普伦 (Gloria Pullen)，然后是詹妮弗·阿克曼 (Jennifer Ackerman)、洛娜·奥尔索普 (Lorna Allsop) 和琳达 (Linda)天。

当时得到了大家的认可...