A Linguist Informs Deaf Education with Sign Language Research

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• A Linguist Informs Deaf Education with Sign Language Research
• Ronnie B. Wilbur (bio)

In 1970, as a graduate student in linguistics (theoretical phonology, typology) at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), I needed a job and was hired by Professor Stephen P. Quigley in the Special Education Department to manage a huge federally funded project investigating problems that deaf children had learning English. I got the job because I already had extensive experience programming computers to conduct large-scale data analysis and familiarity with morphophonological structures in multiple Native American, African, and Austronesian languages.

When Quigley told me that deaf children had problems learning English due to interference from sign language, my first research program emerged: proving him wrong. I already knew from psycholinguistics class that less than 20 percent of second language learning errors could be attributed to the first language (work by Dulay and Burt 1974). Given that the grammatical structure of what we now call American Sign Language (ASL) was virtually unknown, this meant that the focus of my research was to find explanations for the remaining errors observed in deaf children's written language. This led to a series of eleven publications from 1973 to 1989 focused specifically on providing explanations for difficulties with different syntactic structures of English (verbs, conjunctions, pronouns, determiners, [End Page 275] relative clauses, etc.). During the course of this project, I met many people involved in the Deaf education field and four important sign language research founders, colleagues, and friends: Ursula Bellugi (who visited us in Illinois), Edward Klima (when I visited them in La Jolla), Robert Hoffmeister (who was involved in data collection for the project while he was a graduate student in Minnesota), and William Stokoe in connection with Sign Language Studies.

In 1971, I presented the first project paper at the (then) American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) in Chicago, in what became a string of thirty-one presentations over twenty-two straight years, as I attempted to convince professionals in communication disorders, speech pathology, and audiology that knowledge of sign language was not the source of deaf students' difficulties with English. The response from ASHA was very positive (not so much the A. G. Bell Association) and is likely the reason I am currently half in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and half in the Department of Linguistics at Purdue. Around the same time, in 1973 at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) conference in San Diego, there was a special session on "Language of the Deaf," chaired by Ursula Bellugi, in which I presented a comparison of pronoun problems that deaf children had in English with the clear pronoun marking system in ASL, to make the argument that knowledge of ASL was not causing their problems, but how they were taught in class had a lot to do with it. Other papers on ASL were presented by Nancy Frishberg (historical change), Robbin Battison (phonological deletion), Harry Markowicz (with Robbin, sign aphasia and neurolinguistics), James Woodward (sociolinguistic implicational variation), and Susan Fischer (ASL verb inflections and their acquisition).

After spending a year in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California and UCLA, where I had the good fortune to have ASL assistance from the Deaf community at California State University at Northridge, in 1975, I moved to Boston University into a department that changed names and focus several times in the five years I was there—Special Education, Reading and Language Development, and Applied Psycholinguistics. Except for the tremendous support from the Deaf community there, nothing about this job was a good fit for me. One year, I was interim director of the Deaf Education Program [End Page 276] and was fortunate to be able to hire Bob Hoffmeister to take over in that position. What made my stay in Boston tolerable (besides the terrific graduate students) was the way that Harlan Lane opened his lab and his home to me. Harlan gave me a key to his lab at Northeastern University, which now included Robbin Battison, and introduced me to François Grosjean, Hartmut and Janice Teuber, Kerry Green, Jim Stungis, and many others. I was also lucky to be able...