Sign Language Studies最新文献

{"title":"Linguistic Resurgence—Exploring Iconicity in French Sign Language","authors":"Christian Cuxac","doi":"10.1353/sls.2024.a920118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a920118","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Linguistic Resurgence—Exploring Iconicity in French Sign Language <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christian Cuxac (bio) </li> </ul> <p>I<small>t was in</small> 1975 that I first met the Deaf world. As a student in linguistics, I was asked to give introductory courses in linguistics to future teachers of deaf students at the National Institute for Young Deaf People (INJS) in Paris. Like most other naive people who had had the opportunity to see deaf children, teenagers, and adults communicating in signs in public, I had assumed wrongly that this mode of communication (this language?) was used in the classrooms. I discovered at the INJS that it was not the case.</p> <p>At this institute, sign communication between students was tolerated in living areas other than classrooms, where students were only supposed to speak. Thus, in the corridors, the playground, the dining room, and the dormitories, we saw only that: thousands of signs. When asked \"Why don't you use signs with your students?\" the \"specialists\"—teachers, speech therapists, educators, all necessarily hearing—answered that it was not a language (even if they themselves had no knowledge of it) and that, consequently, it would be detrimental to learning French. However, observation of the students' exchanges clearly revealed all the features of a language. In the playground, students signed to each other, played, told stories, <strong>[End Page 390]</strong> argued, laughed, gave advice, just as hearing students do with their vocal language.</p> <p>Indeed, in France in the middle of the 1970s, the oralist ideology reigned supreme in the education of deaf children and teenagers. Very quickly, I understood that what characterized this method during these school years was not only the aim of giving the deaf child access to the oral language of this country (who would not want this?), but also doing this in a way that subordinated an aim of giving access to a broad range of knowledge to that of simply acquiring a preliminary knowledge of the vocal language, this being deemed the only language fit to convey broader information.</p> <p>The result of this oralist-only approach was to delay deaf children's progress in their ten years of elementary school behind that of their hearing counterparts, as access to a vocal language involved methods very difficult for deaf children (i.e., \"démutisation\" through hearing-aid devices and lipreading). Signing (at the time, there was no designation such as \"langue des signes\") was forbidden in the classroom, and many specialized institutions even went so far as to forbid gestural communication between students in all places connected with the institution. The list of occupations available to deaf adults coming from these schools was drastically limited to a few manual jobs. There was also, at that time, no professionally trained corps of int","PeriodicalId":21753,"journal":{"name":"Sign Language Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139981660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: The First Wave of Sign Language Research—Selected Memoirs","authors":"Penny Boyes Braem, Virginia Volterra, Robbin Battison, Nancy Frishberg, Carol Padden","doi":"10.1353/sls.2024.a920099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a920099","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Introduction:<span>The First Wave of Sign Language Research—Selected Memoirs</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Penny Boyes Braem (bio), Virginia Volterra (bio), Robbin Battison (bio), Nancy Frishberg (bio), and Carol Padden (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Why a Special Issue?</h2> <p>Fifty years after William Stokoe founded <em>Sign Language Studies</em> (SLS) in 1972, we have reason to give thanks for a half-century of research and discovery, and to reflect on its origins. Because much has changed since those early days. And many stories have not yet been told.</p> <p>The idea for a special issue arose when two of us (Boyes Braem and Volterra) wrote a short memoir relating our first steps into the nascent field of sign language research about fifty years ago. The SLS <strong>[End Page 185]</strong> editors then proposed expanding it to include memoirs from other pioneering researchers, which would also align with the journal's fiftieth anniversary.</p> <p>Thus, this special issue was born, with Frishberg, Padden, and Battison joining Boyes Braem and Volterra on the editorial team. We gathered twenty-three contributions from early researchers of twelve different sign languages in North America and Europe, as well as a short report on sign languages in six Asian countries and Hawai'i.</p> <p>We asked each of these contributors to describe their first steps in beginning research on the sign language in their country, and to tell it in their own way. They were also encouraged to mention any special conditions they faced as they began their work.</p> <p>The resulting collection serves as historical documentation of how a new research field is born. We believe that the personal details and variety of motivations and settings will interest a wide range of readers—not only the veterans of the field who will recognize their pioneering friends, but also younger researchers seeking insights into the roots of sign language linguistics and related fields.</p> <h2>Scope and Limitations</h2> <p>To ensure the issue's feasibility, we primarily invited researchers who published descriptions of sign languages before 1980 in the United States and before 1990 in Europe. Our goal was not to document how the field has changed over fifty years, but simply to describe the startup phases. Although this cutoff may exclude some early researchers, and not everyone we invited could participate, the collection still offers a representative glimpse into the origins of this field. Following this Introduction is a short list of our contributors, in which they describe why they first became involved in sign language research.</p> <p>Sadly, it was too late for some very influential researchers to contribute, as they are no longer with us—among them William Stokoe, Bernard Tervoort, Paul Jouison, Ursula Bellugi, Edward Klima, Harlan Lane, Mary Brennan, Inger Ahlgren,","PeriodicalId":21753,"journal":{"name":"Sign Language Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139977888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Early Sign Language Research in Two Settings: USA and Switzerland","authors":"Penny Boyes Braem","doi":"10.1353/sls.2024.a920110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a920110","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This contribution begins with my memories as a hearing American-Swiss researcher who began with research on American Sign Language (ASL) and afterward concentrated on Swiss German Sign Language (Deutschschweizerische Gebärdensprache, DSGS). The contribution includes memories of the first research team in German Switzerland: Claudia Murray Jauch, Katja Tissi, and Tanja Tissi.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":21753,"journal":{"name":"Sign Language Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139978253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How I Changed Ed Klima's Mind","authors":"Nancy Frishberg","doi":"10.1353/sls.2024.a920104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a920104","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> How I Changed Ed Klima's Mind <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Nancy Frishberg (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Fall 1970</h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <strong>[End Page 234]</strong></p> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution Figure 1. <p>Nancy Frishberg enjoying bakeries of Rome, Italy (1983). Photo courtesy of Margaret Ransom Cobb.</p> <p></p> <p></p> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution Figure 2. <p>Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi at the Copenhagen Conference in 1979. Photo from the author's collection.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>[End Page 235]</strong> 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.</p> <p>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 l","PeriodicalId":21753,"journal":{"name":"Sign Language Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139981700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"My Role in the \"Linguistic Awakening\" of the Deaf in France","authors":"Marie-Thérése L'huillier","doi":"10.1353/sls.2024.a920117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a920117","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> My Role in the \"Linguistic Awakening\" of the Deaf in France <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Marie-Thérése L'huillier (bio) </li> </ul> <p>B<small>orn deaf</small>, I was immersed in the treasures of LSF (Langue des Signes Français), thanks to my deaf parents. At school, LSF was banished in favor of oralism. During my childhood, the status of my sign language was dichotomous: it existed at home as a mother language and was forbidden at the boarding school in Asnières. At the age of sixteen, I left school with a diploma in sewing.</p> <p>This article briefly traces my career path, which was initially influenced more by my personal experience than by academic studies, although I did complete studies for a BA and an MA later in my career. By chance, in 1977, the unexpected knocked at the door of my office at the Ministry of Labor, where I was working as a typist. It was my first meeting with Alfredo Corrado, an American deaf actor, and Jean Grémion, a French hearing actor, who led me to a new world at the International Visual Theater (IVT), which they founded that year. My first awareness of the historical banning of LSF dates back to when I became part of the original IVT group. This experience changed my career path and inspired me to become involved in the defense of the linguistic rights of LSF signers. <strong>[End Page 376]</strong></p> <p>Now, considering LSF to be a real language, I dedicated myself to jobs linked to LSF and Deaf culture. Being a young deaf militant woman of deaf parents, I fully participated in the emancipation and the mobilization of the Deaf community of France to defend LSF in Paris, as well as in the provinces, being inspired by the American Deaf movement (France 5 TV 2011). While being a pioneer, I led several professional lives, sometimes overlapping, over forty-three years, notably as teacher (1979–2008), storyteller on the television program <em>Mes mains ont la parole</em> (<em>My Hands Have the Word</em>, 1979–1985), producer of the adult television program <em>L'oeil et la main</em> (<em>The Eye and the Hand</em>, 1994–2003), and teacher, lecturer, and researcher in LSF (2008–2018).</p> <h2>Emergence of Individual and Collective Awareness in the Deaf Community</h2> <p>I will now describe the personal and professional stages of my linguistic and metalinguistic awareness of my mother tongue (LSF) and of written French.</p> <p>On a visit to France in the early 1970s, the American deaf actor Alfredo Corrado noticed that French deaf people were much more isolated than American deaf people in terms of accessibility. That is why he and Jean Grémion, a French hearing actor, created a theater for the deaf at the Château de Vincennes in Paris in 1976—the International Visual Theater (IVT). They explained that theater is a way to change the way the hearing world looks at deaf people in France and is thus ","PeriodicalId":21753,"journal":{"name":"Sign Language Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139977659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Teaching Deaf Children to Sign Language Research in Norway","authors":"Marit Vogt-Svendsen","doi":"10.1353/sls.2024.a920122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a920122","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> From Teaching Deaf Children to Sign Language Research in Norway <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Marit Vogt-Svendsen (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Introduction</h2> <p>The motivation for starting with sign language research probably started in my childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s. I was born in Italy where my father was a vicar in the Norwegian seamen's church in Genova, but we came home to Norway when I was two years old. Then, I grew up in Oslo at a home for deaf and deafblind adults with special needs, the Home for the Deaf (Hjemmet for Døve, today called Signo, Conrad Svendsen Centre), where my father was assistant to the director. Since my father was also a vicar for the deaf, my brothers and I occasionally followed him when he gave sermons in the deaf church or visited associations and schools at Christmas, bazaars, etc. As a youth, I occasionally joined the youth club for deaf people in Oslo. In all these environments where deaf children, youngsters, and adults were gathered, I saw the same thing: Deaf people communicated and understood each other very well. I never doubted that sign language was language on an equal footing with spoken language. My childhood experiences gave me an intuitive understanding for free.</p> <p>At the Home for the Deaf, as I remember, there was a basic respect for sign language. Through discussions I witnessed, I eventually understood that there were disagreements between this institution and the <strong>[End Page 452]</strong> schools for the deaf when it came to the acceptance of sign language. I was upset. How could anyone think that sign language was poor and primitive, not a proper language, and should not be used in schools when it was that language deaf persons had access to in normal communication contexts? To me, the debate seemed incomprehensible. I remember discussing this with my father as an early teenager He completely agreed with my arguments. The very first incentive for working with deaf people and sign language was founded.</p> <h2>Becoming a Teacher for Deaf Children</h2> <p>Although I grew up at the Home for the Deaf, my sign language skills were limited. I knew some signs and could make myself understood in simple conversations, but I did not understand all conversations between deaf people. When deaf people signed to me, they adapted their language to my limitations and used a combination of sign and speech. I experienced the same with the pupils at the school for deaf children in Oslo, Skådalen school, where I started as a teacher in 1972, just after finishing my general teacher training. At that time, the job required no sign language competence. I was told to speak and point and use as few signs as possible during the lessons. It must be added that the school for the deaf in Trondheim was probably more sign language-friendly than the one in Oslo. At the Skådalen school, i","PeriodicalId":21753,"journal":{"name":"Sign Language Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139981713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Music to Signs: The Making of a Sign Language Linguist","authors":"Sherman Wilcox","doi":"10.1353/sls.2024.a920108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a920108","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> From Music to Signs:<span>The Making of a Sign Language Linguist</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sherman Wilcox (bio) </li> </ul> <p>A<small>lthough my introduction</small> to sign linguistics took place in a university environment, it was more through personal experience than purely academic study. It was never my goal to become a linguist, much less a sign linguist. I was a music major in college, 1965–1969, at the University of Michigan and Indiana University. After a four-year stint playing oboe in the Air Force Band in Illinois during the Vietnam War, I decided on a change of career and scenery. I moved to Albuquerque, enrolled at the University of New Mexico (UNM), and began working on an MA in special education. In one class, a woman talked to us about the education of deaf children. She signed, and I was immediately fascinated. After class I asked her where I could learn sign language. She told me that a deaf woman, Phyllis Fletcher, was teaching \"manual communication\" at UNM. I took the class, fell in love with my teacher, married her, and thus began the journey.</p> <p>Soon thereafter, I began a doctoral program in educational linguistics at UNM. At the same time, Phyllis and I began working to develop a bachelor of science degree program in signed language interpreting. At the time, in the early 1980s, it was a struggle! We proposed a course in fingerspelling. A member of the university curriculum committee contacted someone at the local school for the deaf about this and was told the idea was silly—one only needed to be given a fingerspelling card. Interpreting education became an important <strong>[End Page 284]</strong> thread in my professional development. I learned and taught our students that interpreters don't transfer words from one language to another, they actively <em>make meaning</em>. Words are not containers of meaning, they are merely cues for the cognitive construction of meaning. This was one precursor to my theoretical approach to sign linguistics.</p> <p>During my doctoral program, I was fortunate to be mentored by Dr. Vera John-Steiner, a scholar of Lev Vygotsky. From Vera, I learned the importance of the interactive function of language. She introduced me to the work of another Russian scholar of language, Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote that \"language for the individual consciousness lies on the borderline between oneself and the other … language is half someone else's.\" Although I was still quite new to the field of linguistics, I began to sense that, for some approaches, language is about individuals producing language in isolation, and grammar is about generating structure. It seemed to me that if interaction is fundamental and language is \"half someone else's\" then comprehension is fundamental. Again, I saw <em>making sense</em>, not only of others but also more essentially of the world ","PeriodicalId":21753,"journal":{"name":"Sign Language Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139977665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Curiosity to Collaboration—Linguistic Explorations of Sign Language in Belgium","authors":"Filip Loncke","doi":"10.1353/sls.2024.a920113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a920113","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> From Curiosity to Collaboration—Linguistic Explorations of Sign Language in Belgium <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Filip Loncke (bio) </li> </ul> <p>I<small>n</small> 1973, Bernard Tervoort of the University of Amsterdam published an article in the journal <em>Semiotica</em> with the title \"Could There Be a Human Sign Language?\" The question that Tervoort had asked in this article must be seen against a theoretical and almost philosophical discussion. Only a decade earlier, in 1960, Charles Hockett, an influential and widely respected linguist, had pointed to the use of the vocal-auditory channel as the most obviously defining design feature of what languages are. However, that same year, 1960, saw the publication of an initially hardly noticed booklet \"Sign Language Structure\" by Stokoe. And the 1960s was also the decade in which linguists adopted theories and views that suggested that the acquisition of a language might rely on an inborn biological tendency shared by all humans. Interest in sign language and sign language research emerged as a natural byproduct.</p> <p>Of course, I didn't know any of that when I started my first job in 1973. I had graduated with a bachelor's degree in educational <strong>[End Page 344]</strong></p> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution Figure 1. <p>Bernard Tervoort. Photo courtesy of lingoblog.dk.</p> <p></p> <p>psychology from the University of Ghent in Belgium. I was hired to work as a coordinator of teaching and other educational staff in a school for children and adolescents with special needs, including about one hundred deaf students between six and sixteen years old. On my first day, the director of the school was going to give me a tour and explain how things were organized. When I arrived at his office to start the tour, I found him in a (in my eyes, very fluent) signing conversation with one of the deaf students. Once we started our tour, he explained the pedagogy that was followed in the school, including a statement that sign language was not used because it interfered with the educational goals, the ability to speak being a primary one.</p> <p>This all felt very confusing to me. I did not know anything about deafness or deaf education, let alone of the existence of a deaf <strong>[End Page 345]</strong> community. I started to ask and read left and right and was, at the same time, amazed to find almost entirely disconnected circuits of thinking with, on the one hand, a growing fascination of language in the visual modality and, on the other hand, a total lack of interest or curiosity on how these new findings should be urging a rethinking of old ideas and educational practices.</p> <p>Was sign language a language or not, and if it was, what does this mean? I listened to what educators told me and what I could find in the literature, which was initially not too m","PeriodicalId":21753,"journal":{"name":"Sign Language Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139977666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Beginnings of Sign Language Research in Italy: A Story of Unexpected Encounters","authors":"Virginia Volterra, Maria Cristina Caselli, Serena Corazza","doi":"10.1353/sls.2024.a920121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a920121","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>We'll begin this contribution by describing our own individual entry points and motivations as we stepped into this nascent field of research. We'll then briefly summarize the initial stages of research on Italian Sign Language, which was carried out with many other collaborators.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":21753,"journal":{"name":"Sign Language Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139977667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exploring the Psycholinguistics of ASL with Harlan Lane","authors":"François Grosjean","doi":"10.1353/sls.2024.a920105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a920105","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Exploring the Psycholinguistics of ASL with Harlan Lane <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> François Grosjean (bio) </li> </ul> <p>I<small>t all started</small> 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).</p> <p>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 <strong>[End Page 252]</strong></p> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution Figure 1. <p>Harlan Lane and François Grosjean in the 1980s.</p> <p></p> <p>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 <em>Journal of Experimental Psychology</em>. From being a teacher and thesis advisor, Harlan slowly became a research partner and a friend.</p> <p>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, <em>The Wild Boy of Aveyron</em> (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 <strong>[End Page 253]</strong> 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 Die","PeriodicalId":21753,"journal":{"name":"Sign Language Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139977750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}