Sign Language Studies

Marie-Thérèse Abbou-L'Huillier, as a deaf daughter of deaf parents, first became aware of the linguistic and artistic aspects of her native French Sign Language through her experiences as a cofounder and very young participant in the International Visual Theater (IVT) in Paris. Her interest in the language was strengthened during an internship at Gallaudet in 1979, after which she collaborated with one of the first French Sign Language linguists, Christian Cuxac, and engaged in extensive didactic and artistic research related to French Sign Language.

Ben Bahan has been a storyteller in ASL since childhood. At Gallaudet University, he pursued a major in biology but remained involved in performance and storytelling. He heard about a job opening in Bill Stokoe's lab in 1977 and was hired to transcribe signs. He parlayed this experience into a research assistant job at the Salk Institute with Ursula Bellugi. He went on to graduate study in linguistics at Boston University but remained involved in storytelling and video production. After completing his doctorate in nonmanual marking in ASL sentences, he became faculty in Deaf studies at Gallaudet University in 1996.

Charlotte Baker-Shenk, while pursuing graduate degrees in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, was encouraged to take a sign language class because of her prior interest in nonverbal behavior. That led her to begin research on American Sign Language in 1975 at the Linguistics Research Lab (LRL) at Gallaudet University with William Stokoe. She wrote her dissertation on the linguistic functions of nonmanual behaviors in ASL questions.

Robbin Battison entered the field of sign language accidentally in 1970 as a student at the University of California, San Diego when he was offered a job as a research assistant in the Bellugi lab at the Salk Institute. His work for the next ten years focused on American Sign Language phonology, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. He was lucky enough to work at two other hotbeds of sign language research: Gallaudet College (now University) and Northeastern University in Boston.

Brita Bergman was aware of sign language in her high school years, when she spent many afternoons in a café frequented by three signing deaf men. In 1971, as a linguistics student, she visited a school for deaf and hard of hearing children in Stockholm, where she thought it didn't make sense that signing wasn't used. Signing immediately became the topic for her bachelor's thesis, for which she first learned a form of signed Swedish but then went on to learn Swedish Sign Language, producing a first analysis of the subcomponents of the signs of this language.

Penny Boyes Braem, after completing a bachelor's in history and a master's in teaching English, first became aware of sign language when she was asked to jump in as a temporary substitute English teacher at a school for the deaf. Her curiosity about American Sign Language there led to doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1970s, which included time spent at the Bellugi Lab at the Salk Institute. After she moved permanently to Switzerland in 1973, she founded a private center for sign language research, and most of her subsequent research has been on Swiss German Sign Language.

Maria Cristina Caselli wrote her thesis in the Philosophy Department at the University of Rome on the role of gesture in the language acquisition of hearing children. In a visit with her advisor, Virginia Volterra, at the Bellugi lab in 1981, she was able to compare the first signs produced by an American deaf child with the early gestures she had seen in very young hearing Italian children, a thread of research she continued to follow when she returned to Rome, which included collaborating on studies of Italian Sign Language.

Serena Corazza, born deaf to deaf parents and growing up in Trieste, had been in contact with many signed and spoken/written languages her entire life. Her first contact with linguistics...