September 23rd was declared by the UN as the International Day of Sign Languages/Signs (you can see the official resolution here). On the occasion of this date, you might like to know five facts about sign language research.
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| William C. Stokoe (photo: Lynn Johnson, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia) |
1. The Oldest Paper
It is not easy to identify the oldest paper on Sign Language. For Microsoft
Academic, the first publication in the history of sign language dates from
1927, but it does not refer to the Sign Language of Deaf people, but to the
form of communication used by the native Indian population of North America
(it can be downloaded for free as a PDF from
here).
However, the oldest papers on Sign Language may be those of the
University of Gallaudet. No less than in 1847 they published the first issue of the historic
American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb. The first article that uses the
word 'signs' in its title is from October 1851, and is entitled 'Advantages
and Disadvantages of the Use of Signs' and is signed by John Carlin [1], a
birth Deaf person quite prodigious for his time, as he was a prolific
painter and writer of poems, something unprecedented at the time for a
person who had never heard speech [2]. Carlin was also one of the people who
promoted the founding of what would later become the University of
Gallaudet, and he is credited with the idea of putting up a monument to
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet
with
Alice Cogswell.
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| Cover of an 1848 issue of the American Annals of the Deaf (left) and text of the first article published in this journal mentioning the signs in 1851 (right) |
Along the magazine, sign language was called 'natural signs', 'colloquial
signs', 'sitematic signs' or 'methodical signs' until, finally, it appears
in the title of an article in 1858 as sign language and entitled 'Mode of
learning the sign language' [3]. In the same year, an article was published
in another journal simply entitled 'Sign language' [4], which dealt with the
life of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and began with a very interesting anecdote:
Im the summer of 1818, a young Chinese passed through Hartford, and spent an evening with Mr. Gallaudet. He was so ignorant of the English language that he could not express it in his simplest wishes. Mr Gallaudet introduced him to M. Clerc, a deaf mute from birth, who did not know a single word of Chinese. No two persons, therefore, could possibly be brought together more disqualified for colloquial intercourse. The result, however, surprised all present. M. Clerc learned from the Chinese many interesting facts regarding his birth-place, his parents and their family, his occupations at home, and his ideas of God and a future state. By the aid of proper signs, also, M. Clerc ascertained the meaning of about twenty Chinese words. So remarkable was Mr. Gallaudet's success in the sign-language, as frequently to astoaish strangers.
Thus,
the first scientific publication in history with a title referring to
signs dates from 1851 and the first article with the title of sign
language dates from 1858. There are several things to note:
- That these papers were not really scientific even though they appear in scientific journals.
- That the sign language terms probably appeared earlier, but not in the titles.
- That the first written appearance of sign language is actually from 1824, according to the Merrian Webster dictionary.
(all articles published in the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb between
1847 and 1886 are available free of charge in PDF
here)
2. Unstoppable Scientific Work
Since then, the number of published research papers has increased timidly
until the first decade of the 21st century (2000-2010), when scientific output
skyrocketed. For example, more research was published in 2006 than between
1927 and 1980: 566 papers were published in just one year compared to 507 in
the previous five decades.
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| Number of scientific publications on Sign Language per year, between 1970 and 2019 (own elaboration from Microsoft Academic) |
In total there are about 17,000 scientific publications so far, according to Microsoft Academic, and the most prolific year was 2015 with almost 1,200 publications in a single year. Obviously, the impact has also been increasing in line with the number of publications, with 2014 being the year with the greatest impact with 17,810 citations (if you don't know how to measure the impact of a scientific publication, here is an explanation).
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3. The Most Prolific Researchers
In the last decade, some researchers have been working frantically and
publishing several times a year. For example,
Bencie Woll from the UK and Karen Emmorey from the US have published an
average of four to six research papers, articles or books each year
between 1998 and 2020.
In the following list of the 10 most prolific researchers of the last
decade, we can see that they belong to only five countries: Germany, the
United States, Israel, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It is also
interesting to note that
60% are women and there is only one Deaf researcher.
| Researcher | Country | Sex | Person | Main line of research | Total publications |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bencie Woll | United Kingdom | Deafness, Cognition and Language | 146 | ||
| Karen Emmorey | United States | Sign Language, Cognition and Brain | 87 | ||
| Onno Crasborn | The Netherlands | Sign Language Linguistics | 76 | ||
| Wendy Sandler | Israel | Sign Language Linguistics | 72 | ||
| Susan Goldin-Meadow | United States | Language Development | 65 | ||
| Gary Morgan | United Kingdom | Language Acquisition in Deaf Children | 63 | ||
| Marc Marschark | United States | Education of Deaf Children | 53 | ||
| Hermann Ney | Germany | Video Recognition of Sign Language | 44 | ||
| Carol Padden | United States | Sign Langauge, Communication and Culture | 43 | ||
| Rachel I. Mayberry | United States | Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics in Language Acquisition | 43 |
4. The Universities That Do Most Research
We can find out which universities publish the most research, although it
should be borne in mind that the number of research publications is not
related to the scientific impact or quality of the research.
According to
Microsoft Academic,
among the 20 universities and research centres in the world that have
published the most research on Sign Language, eleven are in the United
States (55% of the total), two in Germany, two in the United Kingdom, two in China, one in France,
one in Israel and one in the Netherlands. In the following graph they are
ordered from the most to the least number of publications in the last two
decades:
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An interesting fact is that only six of the 20 universities are private,
i.e. 70% of the universities that publish the most research on sign language
are public.
5. The Most Influential Research
William C. Stokoe was an American linguist and researcher who had a profound
impact on the modern linguistics of Sign Language, as he made a rich
description of the complex linguistic properties of Sign Language that
contributed decisively to its recognition as a natural language in Deaf
people. So it is not surprising that
Stokoe's work published in 1960 and entitled 'Sign language structure: An
outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf' is
the most cited in history in relation to sign language:
almost three thousand subsequent publications refer to Stokoe's work, which
is a measure of his enormous scientific impact.
| Citations | Source | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| 2.934 | Scholar | Stokoe Jr, W. C. (2005). Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf. Journal of deaf studies and deaf education, 10(1), 3-37. [original published in 1960] |
| 1.517 | Scholar | Starner, T., Weaver, J., & Pentland, A. (1998). Real-time american sign language recognition using desk and wearable computer based video. IEEE Transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, 20(12), 1371-1375. |
| 1.445 | Scholar | Liddell, S. K. (2003). Grammar, gesture, and meaning in American Sign Language. Cambridge University Press. |
| 1.313 | Academic | Lane, H. L., Hoffmeister, R., & Bahan, B. J. (1996). A journey into the DEAF-WORLD. Dawn Sign Press. |
| 1.269 | Scholar | Sandler, W., & Lillo-Martin, D. (2006). Sign language and linguistic universals. Cambridge University Press. |
| 1.177 | Academic | Emmorey, K. (2001). Language, cognition, and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Psychology Press. |
| 1.106 | Scholar | Battison, R., & Baird, E. (1978). Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language. |
| 1.081 | Scholar | Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., & Sloetjes, H. (2006). ELAN: a professional framework for multimodality research. In 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 1556-1559). |
| 1.032 | Scholar | Starner, T., y Pentland, A. (1997). Real-time american sign language recognition from video using hidden markov models. In Motion-based recognition (pp. 227-243). Springer, Dordrecht. |
| 1.023 | Scholar | Groce, N. E. (1985). Everyone here spoke sign language: Hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard. Harvard University Press. |
As it could not be otherwise, four of the ten works with the greatest
scientific impact in history deal with purely linguistic issues of Sign
Language, but it is remarkable that in this top ten two researches on
video recognition of Sign Language have been placed and that both are from
1997 and 1998. In addition, one of these researches - that of 1998 - is
the second most cited research on Sign Language in history after Stokoe.
In any case,
there is one researcher who stands out on this list:
Karen Emmorey
(San Diego State University, USA), because in addition to being one of the most prolific researchers
of the last two decades, as we have seen in point 3, she is also the one
who has written one of the books with the greatest impact factor in
history (in 2001).
Sources:
- [1] Carlin, J. (1851). Advantages and Disadvantages of the Use of Signs. American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, 4(1), 49-57. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/44401185
- [2] Smithsonian American Art Museum (s/f). John Carlin. Retrieved from https://americanart.si.edu/artist/john-carlin-743
- [3] Jacobs, J. (1858). Mode of learning the sign language. American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, 10(2), 70-72. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/45220583
- [4] Gallaudet, T. H. (1858). Sign-Language. The RI Schoolmaster, 4(10), 296-298.
