Presented in collaboration with ASL and Deaf Studies in Penn's Department of Linguistics
Image courtesy of Diane Lillo-Martin
The natural sign languages used in deaf communities are rich and structured, in the same way that languages around the world are. Even still, there are many misconceptions about whether or not it is appropriate for hearing parents of deaf children to sign with them. This presentation will show what it looks like for a child to become a bimodal bilingual, using two languages in two modalities (speech and sign), and how hearing parents can be part of this journey.
Dr. Diane Lillo-Martin received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego and joined the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut in 1986. She is currently a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Linguistics Department. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the CT Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and a former fellow of the UConn Humanities Institute. Dr. Lillo-Martin’s main research interest is to better understand the human language faculty. Primarily she examines this by studying the structure and acquisition of American Sign Language, and by looking at the process of language acquisition across different languages. Her current focus is language acquisition by deaf children in hearing families. She is a hearing L2 signer of ASL.
