Sign Language Studies

It took me a long time, many years, before I stopped having dreams about the Linguistics Research Lab (LRL) at Gallaudet—of being part of something so much bigger than myself. Of good-hearted and bright-minded colleagues working tirelessly to discover and document the complex, brilliant structures of a denigrated language—and in doing so, to help alleviate the pain of an oppressed community that had been told it "didn't have a language." The LRL had been a beehive of activity, fielding urgent requests for information and assistance from people all around the world, and a welcoming, resting place for Deaf¹ people working on the Gallaudet campus and elsewhere who would regularly show up to share their painful experiences.

But I didn't start with an awareness of this struggle. Before ar riving at the LRL, I was simply a graduate student in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1970s with a background in psychology and an interest in the nonverbal behavior of hearing people while speaking. On a whim, I took an evening class in sign language with a Deaf instructor and fell in love with the language. That led me to help set up a fieldwork class at Berkeley with a Deaf instructor—and eventually to request a meeting with William C. Stokoe and ask for the opportunity to work with him at the LRL. At our first meeting, Dr. Stokoe (Bill) generously spent an entire day with me responding to my many questions and sharing LRL resources. However, because I couldn't muster the courage to ask about working at the LRL, I instead asked to return the next day, and Bill agreed. When I finally asked him the following day, Bill responded with his typical welcome and hearty support. My work there began in the summer of 1975. [End Page 203]

Bill and I ended up receiving a multiyear grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the linguistic functions of non-manual behaviors in American Sign Language (ASL), which became my area of research for many years. I was also fortunate, as a graduate student, to meet Drs. Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen at their Human Interaction Lab at UC San Francisco, and to become part of their pioneering work in training a group of graduate students to reliably use their new Facial Action Coding System (FACS). FACS eventually became the primary tool I used for my dissertation research—meticulously coding all the facial movements, muscle by muscle, of native Deaf signers in conversations.

It took hundreds of hours watching videotaped segments over and over again (noting changes in each video "field," sixty fields per second) to numerically code and analyze a total of three conversational minutes! The results were astonishing—facial movements were actually the signaling backbone structure of the syntax of ASL, while also providing information about the affect of the signer and helping to regulate turn-taking. As researchers on other sign languages have since confirmed, these visual-gestural languages are NOT simply "manual" languages. They are multichannel languages that effectively utilize various "articulators" of the body.

However, with that work, I begin to experience a tension between purely academic pursuits for the joy of exploring a fascinating language—and a growing awareness of the deep pain of its users. As my own ASL skills improved (thanks to the patient mentoring of Deaf colleagues like Carol Padden, Ella Mae Lentz, Patrick Graybill, and MJ Bienvenu, who also became friends; see figure 1). I began to feel the urgency of getting the results of linguistic research out into the Deaf community as well as using those results to challenge the assumptions and practices of sign language teaching, sign language interpreting, and deaf education—all of which were characterized by stunning insanities: Hearing people who didn't know the indigenous language but were employed to teach it. Hearing interpreters who signed in ways unintelligible to Deaf people. Hearing teachers who couldn't communicate with their students but then blamed the poor academic achievements of their students on their deafness rather than on the teachers' own lack of...