Sign Language Studies

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]

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 how to work with us or any deaf student, or any sign language, for that matter. We made mistakes, but all of us wanted to do good science. This is a candid history of an emerging science involving deaf people in our lifetimes. [End Page 291]

As we look back on our long careers, we stand in awe at the quantity and the richness of work that is done by each new generation of deaf and hearing scientists about sign languages and their communities. The study of sign language now extends to nearly every corner of the globe, and it involves so many different research groups producing vastly more data, making more discoveries, and contributing more publications and videos than we could have imagined back in the 1980s and 1990s. We hope what we share here about our lives will humanize what it means to do science about deaf and hearing people in this world.