Sign Language Research at the Millennium

Abstract

Ursula Bellugi and Ed Klima hold a remarkable position in the field of sign language research, and also therefore in the broader field of the cognitive sciences. Within the field of sign language research, they established one of the two research groups that founded the field, and during the formative years of the field they were responsible both for producing most of the findings on sign language structure and acquisition and for training almost everyone who subsequently entered the field. It is therefore hard to overestimate the debt our field owes to them. Even more significant, however, is the fact that they framed the central questions of the field in such a way that this relatively small subarea has had an enormous impact on and importance to the entire enterprise of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience. Their questions have always been the big ones: Are sign languages structured and acquired in the same ways as spoken languages, or are there important differences? Is language therefore a faculty specially developed and evolved in the auditory mode, or is there independence of language from modality? What does this tell us about the nature of language and about the nature of the cognitive and neural mechanisms that produce it? Because they have always framed their questions in this way, those of us who have worked with them and have entered the field through working in their lab have also thought about these same “big questions.” The result of continually keeping their eye (eyes?) on this perspective has meant that only 25 or 30 years of research by two profoundly thoughtful investigators and their students and collaborators have entirely changed the way the field of cognitive science thinks about language. Jerry Kagan recently asked one of us, in casual conversation, what the 10 most important findings in the field were. Only one came to mind: the findings of the last two decades on signed languages. We have been extremely fortunate to participate in the field during this period of time and to work with Ursula and Ed during important parts of it.

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