About Us

In our work, we use sign language to learn about language in two ways. One way is to strip away the effects of the physical channel – vocal or manual – and see what formal patterns of words, meaning, intonation, and syntax are left. The other way is to use the very physical manifestations of sign language – motions of the hands, face, and body – to guide us to the most basic building blocks of human language, which may be less accessible in the speech signal. Our work takes us to languages of large urban deaf communities as well as to indigenous sign languages found in small towns and villages, some of them still emerging before our eyes.