Comparisons of Sign Languages of the World
Ted Supalla
The study of signed languages of the world, particularly those which have emerged naturally within communities of deaf people, provides unusual insight into the way humans process and develop communication systems. From such research we are beginning to learn that, to a surprising degree, the structure of languages and the processes by which they are formed are the same for spoken and signed languages, and are therefore constrained by factors that cross input and output modalities.
My research involves three main lines of work. First, I am interested in universals of language, including the comparison between spoken languages and signed languages, as well as the similarities and differences among sign languages themselves. In this research I conduct linguistic analyses of American Sign Language (ASL), particularly its morphology, and I also analyze related structures in 20 different sign languages in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Second, I am interested in how sign languages are formed. Part of this work examines the continuum from nonlinguistic gesture to gestural language, comparing gesture as used by hearing people, "home sign" systems devised within families who have deaf members, and full sign languages such as ASL, to determine where and how linguistic properties appear in the evolution from nonlinguistic to linguistic use of the same modalities.
Third, I am interested in the on-line processing of ASL, including studies of sentence comprehension and memory as well as fMRI studies asking what parts of the brain are activated during visual-gestural language processing.