Exploring the Psycholinguistics of ASL with Harlan Lane

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• Exploring the Psycholinguistics of ASL with Harlan Lane
• François Grosjean (bio)

It all started when I received a letter from Harlan Lane postmarked in San Diego, at the beginning of 1974, inviting me to the United States. Harlan and I had first met in 1969 when he had come to the University of Paris 8 (Vincennes) as a visiting faculty. He had a permanent position at the University of Michigan, after having studied at Columbia and Harvard, and despite his young age of thirty-three at the time, he was already quite famous (figure 1).

I was a young French teaching assistant looking around for a good thesis topic and an advisor. I followed some courses and seminars with him and quickly became totally captivated by this American professor who was such an amazing teacher. I knew after a while that I had found my future area of expertise, psycholinguistics, and the thesis advisor I was looking for. We agreed that I would work on temporal variables—speech rate and its components, that is, articulation rate and number and duration of pauses—in a first and a second language. Harlan helped me design the appropriate studies and guided me each step of the way. I was simply amazed that a faculty member was prepared [End Page 252]

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Harlan Lane and François Grosjean in the 1980s.

to spend so much time and energy guiding someone's research. It was only later that I was to discover that this was the American way of doing things. Our partnership worked perfectly, and out of those Paris years together came, not only my thesis, but also a number of papers we published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. From being a teacher and thesis advisor, Harlan slowly became a research partner and a friend.

After several years in France, much to my regret, Harlan went back to the United States to take up a visiting position at the University of California in San Diego. Just before saying goodbye, in late 1972, I told him that if ever he saw a way of getting me over to America, my family and I would be willing to move over for a year or two. We kept in touch by letter, and through his occasional visits to Paris, I learned, among other things, that he was working on his future book, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Lane 1976). It is the story of Victor, a wild boy found in the Aveyron department of France in the early 1800s, and of the years he spent under the care of physician and educator Jean-Marc Itard. It was while Harlan was preparing this book that he had his [End Page 253] first contact with sign language, since Itard had tried teaching Victor French Sign Language. But Harlan's real immersion in the language was at the Salk Institute in San Diego, where Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima had welcomed him into their laboratory. He quickly became involved in some of their projects, the most notable being the perception of handshapes in American Sign Language (ASL), which led to a much-cited paper by Lane, Boyes-Braem, and Bellugi (1976).

Let's now come back to that 1974 letter. In it Harlan asked me whether I would be willing to come and join him at Northeastern University in Boston, where he had just been appointed chair of the Psychology Department. I would help him set up his laboratory there, continue the work we had been doing together on temporal variables, and include ASL in our studies. I jumped at the opportunity and set about obtaining a Fulbright-Hays grant. Six months later, I arrived in the United States with my wife, Lysiane, and our baby son.

Setting up Harlan's Laboratory

We started from scratch. The laboratory—one large room and a few smaller rooms—was totally empty when we arrived except for a new Digital PDP 11 computer, which no one knew how to use. Harlan and I quickly went on a crash course at DEC (Digital Equipment Company) in Maynard and then, after a while, we...