Research
Our research investigates the production and perception of American Sign Language and strives to understand the neural system which mediates sign language use.
WHAT IS A SIGNED LANGUAGE?
Signed languages are spontaneously-arising natural languages used by Deaf people. There are many different unrelated signed languages throughout the world. Wherever there are communities of Deaf people, there is a signed language. The signed language used in the US and parts of Canada is known as American Sign Language or ASL.
Spoken languages may be the dominant communication system used throughout the world, but signed languages are not manual translations of spoken languages used by hearing people. Rather signed languages are autonomous languages that exhibit linguistically complex structures and are fully able to convey abstract concepts.
Signed languages are not simply conventionalized gestures. Each sign exhibits a complex hierarchical linguistic structure. Linguistic properties of morphology, syntax, and discourse are found in signed languages. Even the acquisition of signed language in infants exposed to signing from birth follows a developmental time course similar to that of spoken language. William Stokoe’s ground breaking work in the 1960’s launched the formal studies of ASL in the United States.
WHY STUDY SIGNED LANGUAGES?
The study of signed language brings together knowledge of visual processing, movement control, and language processing and thus provides a rich and insightful domain of inquiry.
For example, the comparison of signed and spoken languages can help us to determine those aspects of language structure which are similar across human languages from those that result for the modality in which the language is expressed. This knowledge is not only intrinsically interesting, but is necessary in developing diagnostic measures of language processing.
WHO STUDIES SIGNED LANGUAGES?
We do! We are a team of graduate and undergraduate students, a post-doctoral scholar, and staff researchers lead by Professor David Corina. We are interested in how deaf and hearing people perceive and process signed language. Learn more about us by visiting the People page on this site.
We conduct research at the University of California - Davis Center for Mind and Brain and at the Imaging Research Center in Sacramento. Our lab also has projects at Gallaudet University.
If you would like to participate in a study, please visit the Participate page on this site to see the types of experiments we are currently running.
Exploring the Mind Speaker Series - Dr. Paul Ekman, UC San Francisco