Sign Language Studies

Fall 1970

With an undergraduate degree in linguistics from University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley), I came to grad school in linguistics at University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Why UCSD? Because of the six places I applied to, five of which accepted me, only UCSD gave me financial support, in this case for being a foreign language teaching assistant. I arrived with an introduction to Ursula Bellugi from Dan Slobin, whose seminar in child language acquisition I'd taken at Berkeley.

My first week, I was assigned to share an office with Rick Lacy, the other language tutor for Russian. (Some linguistics grad students taught foreign language grammar and reading, while native speakers from other departments taught conversational skills.) I had announced my interest in pursuing child language acquisition as a specialty at the department welcoming meeting. Though there was no faculty member who specialized in this area, Edward S. Klima, known to me for his (1964) work on English negation, stepped up as my advisor. And I learned then that he was also Ursula Bellugi's husband. So, Rick and Ed knew about my interest in first language acquisition.

Rick let me know about the inaugural Friday seminar at the Salk Institute for the Biological Sciences—just a quarter-mile north from UCSD's psychology-and-linguistics building—where we could meet others intrigued by first language acquisition. Ursula Bellugi had [End Page 234]

[End Page 235] recently gotten a federal grant to continue her work on children acquiring first languages, this time focused on how deaf children with signing deaf parents learn sign language as a native language. Because the Salk Institute was dedicated to biological sciences, this grant proposal and the many that followed were framed as explorations into the biological foundations of language, as initiated by Eric Lenneberg (1967). Susan Fischer started her postdoctoral role at the Bellugi lab that same semester. Robbin Battison, still an undergrad, joined in. And Don Newkirk was already on board, though he spent part of that year elsewhere as part of his military service.

I arrived at UCSD from Berkeley's linguistics department, cofounded by Mary Haas, who aimed to preserve as many native languages of North America as possible before the speakers died. Her directive was that linguists must write a grammar and a dictionary and collect texts (of all sorts) to be confident they had documented a language. (It didn't have to be one person doing all three parts.) So, I arrived with the expectation that it was possible to make a dictionary, a grammar and collect texts for sign language. It was more complicated than I expected, since we had no way to represent language in another modality. We all recognized we did not have an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), or any standardized conventions for writing signs to accurately represent their formations.

I arrived at Salk knowing a dozen signs, including kinship terms (boy, girl, mother, father, grandmother, grandfather), few animal names (horse, mule, cow, dog, cat), and my junior high school friend's grandfather's name sign, with decent fingerspelling production (legible, fast enough for some familiar names and words) but terrible receptive skills for both signs and fingerspelling. Bonnie Gough, our deaf signing consultant, nonetheless declared that I had "soft hands," which apparently was a desirable quality.

Chance Favors the Prepared Mind

I mentioned my friend's grandfather, whose name sign was in my small repertoire. He was Grover Farquhar, a teacher at the Missouri School for the Deaf, who had three hearing daughters, each of whom [End Page 236] was reputed to be the best interpreter. My schoolmate, Mary Keller, was the oldest child of the Farquhars' oldest, Marie Jo Keller.

At some point, probably in 1962, the Farquhar grandparents and an aunt from Missouri visited the Keller household in Los Angeles. I...