Carol Padden

For most of my career I have been involved in the study of sign language. In the early part of my career, I studied how grammatical structures of sign languages differ from those of spoken languages, with most of my publications about American Sign Language (ASL). Over the last 20 years, with my colleagues Mark Aronoff, Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler, I began to study an emerging sign language developing in social and cultural circumstances different from that of North America. Where ASL has a long history extending from at least the early 19^th century, this emerging sign language appeared in a Bedouin village roughly in the 1930s and 1940s, and is shared among hearing and deaf people living in the village.

Human languages exist in the nourishing medium of culture and society. Sign language and communities of signers have been recorded in literature through history since the ancient times. Modern technologies such as cochlear implants and genetic engineering have brought to the forefront a debate about disability and culture. On the one hand, sign language is celebrated as a remarkable example of the human capacity for language across modalities. On the other, modern technologies are described as opportunities for eliminating sign languages. In my work on culture, I explore ways in which understanding the complexity of humans – how they communicate, participate in society, and live among different others – provides a way of imagining more expansive futures.

Padden, C. & T. Humphries (2005) Inside Deaf Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Humphries, T. and C. Padden (1992, 2004) Learning American Sign Language, Second Edition. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Padden, C. and T. Humphries (1988) Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Padden, C., & Humphries, J. (2020). Who goes first? Deaf people and CRISPR germline editing. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 63(1), 54-65.

Hwang, S., Tomita, N., Morgan, H., Ergin, R., Ilkbasaran, D., Seegers, S., Lepic, R. & C. Padden (2017) Of the body and the hands: Patterned iconicity for semantic categories. Language and Cognition, 9:4, 573-602. DOI:10.1017/langcog.2016.28

Meir, I., Aronoff, M., Börstell, C., Hwang, S., Ilkbasaran, D., Kastner, I., Lepic, R., Lifshitz, A., Padden, C. & W. Sandler (2017) The effect of being human and the basis of grammatical word order: Insights from novel communication systems and young sign languages. Cognition, 158:189-207.

Padden, C., Hwang, S., Lepic, R., & S. Seegers (2014) Tools for language: Patterned iconicity in sign language nouns and verbs. Topics in Cognitive Science, 7, 81-94.

Padden, C., Hwang, S., Lepic, Ryan, Seegers, S., and T. Sampson (2013) Patterned iconicity in a new sign language. Gesture, 13:3, 287-308.

Meir, I., Israel, A., Sandler, W., Padden, C. and Aronoff, M. (2013) The influence of community on language structure: Evidence from two young sign languages. Linguistic Variation, 12(2), 247-291.

Meir, I., Padden, C., Sandler, W. & Aronoff, M. (2013) Competing iconicities. Cognitive Linguistics, 24, 309-343. DOI: 10.1515/cog-2013-0010

Humphries, T., Kushalnagar, P., Mathru, G., Napoli, D.J., Padden, C., Rathmann, C., & Smith, S. (2012) Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches. Harm Reduction Journal, 9:16 DOI:10.1186/1477-7517-9-16

Goldin-Meadow, S., Shield, A., Lenzen, D., Herzig, M. & Padden, C. (2012) The gestures ASL signers use tell us when they are ready to learn math. Cognition, DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.02.006

Meir, I., Padden, C., Aronoff, M. and Sandler, W. (2007) Body as subject. Journal of Linguistics 43, 531-563.

Sandler, W. Meir, I., Padden, C. & Aronoff, M. (2005) The emergence of grammar: Systematic structure in a new language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102 (7), 2661-2665.

Roots of language

With Mark Aronoff, Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler, I have been investigating the emergence of language structure in a sign language that was created in a close-knit community across 4 generations of signers ago. We find that by the second generation of signers, a number of structures have emerged: consistent word order, basic compounding, and differentiation of nouns and verbs within natural classes of signs. We are also developing descriptions of language emergence using laboratory modeling of gesture and artificial language. Our project combines studies in the field with studies in the laboratory, a dual approach to understanding the fundamental properties of human language

Sign language structure

Studies of sign language structure aim to uncover fundamental properties of human languages. Some aspects of sign languages are similar to spoken language structure: having levels of linguistic organization from the phonological to the morphological and syntactic. Other aspects of sign languages are less like spoken languages, for example, the verb agreement system which can be divided into three major classes: 1) plain verbs (which lack agreement), 2) spatial verbs (which describe locations) and 3) agreement verbs (for person and number agreement). Agreement in spoken languages rarely applies just to a single semantic class, instead appears across verbs. I have explored other areas of sign language structure that may be unusual to sign languages: fingerspelling, a manual system for representing alphabetic letters that is not iconic, and how descriptive signs vary depending on semantic class such as man-made vs. natural objects.

Language and culture

Tom Humphries and I published two books on cultures and communities of Deaf people in the U.S.: Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Harvard University Press, 1988) and Inside Deaf Culture (Harvard University Press, 2005). Our first book has been translated into 4 languages: French, Korean, Japanese and German. Our second book was also translated into Japanese. We view culture as a dynamic process; at its heart are practices carried out in broad context. We have examined practices relating to rituals and performances as well as practical behavior such as how to learn to read without access to speech, or learning to see and watch others in signed conversation. Among the topics I have addressed in my published work about culture are: performance in ASL, rhetoric in early ASL film (dating from 1913), and the future of sign languages during the age of cochlear implants and genetic engineering.

MOOC: Sign languages of the world

With a team at UCSD, I am developing an online course about sign languages of the world. The course is a combination of lectures, videos, and activities showcasing the diversity of sign languages across all the continents of the world. We hope this course will be part of a package of online courses about American Sign Language (ASL), who uses sign languages, and where sign languages are found around the world.

I was born in Washington, DC, the second deaf child of deaf parents who were faculty at Gallaudet University. I attended pre-school and the first two grades at Kendall School for the Deaf on the Gallaudet campus. My mother also graduated from Kendall School and my father, the Minnesota School for the Deaf in Faribault. In third grade, I transferred to a public school in my neighborhood and remained in the public school system until I graduated from high school. The experience of leaving a small and intimate school for deaf children for a large public school with no other deaf students was a long adjustment, one which I describe as like being “educated abroad.” My interest in language is rooted in the experience of moving between different worlds and translating across cultures. As the only deaf child among hearing classmates, I knew that at the end of the day, I would return home to my parents and my family who, like me, are deaf.

While an undergraduate at Georgetown University, I worked with Bill Stokoe at Gallaudet in the Linguistics Research Laboratory. After graduation, I worked briefly for the National Association of the Deaf before entering graduate school in Linguistics at UC San Diego where I studied with David Perlmutter and Ursula Bellugi at the Salk Institute. Upon completing my PhD in 1983, I joined the faculty in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego. The Communication Department is an interdisciplinary department whose faculty carry out studies of communicative practices. In addition to my research on sign languages, my work has also explored: history and contemporary life in Deaf culture, how adults and teachers plan reading instruction for young deaf children, and the future of Deaf people in the age of cochlear implants and genetic engineering. I recently coauthored an article on CRISPR with my daughter, Jacqueline Humphries who also holds a PhD from UC San Diego (Biology) and is a research scientist at a biotech company.

I am married to Tom Humphries, a frequent coauthor and collaborator on a number of projects. Tom and I have volunteered for community organizations and academic institutions over the years, including the Board of Directors of Deaf Community Services of San Diego, the Board of Trustees of Gallaudet University and the Board of Directors of the Deaf West Theater in Los Angeles, California.