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Ted Supalla, Ph.D. Visiting Professor
SHORT BIOGRAPHY Ted Supalla is a Deaf scholar who has been doing basic research for almost thirty years, first as a research assistant teaching sign language to chimpanzees at Reno, Nevada, and then as a graduate student working with Dr. Ursula Bellugi at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California on the structure of American Sign Language. In 1982 he received his Ph.D in experimental psychology from the University of California, San Diego. After graduate school, he became a full-time researcher at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, studying the structure and acquisition of ASL in collaboration with Dr. Elissa Newport with whom he continues to work with today in Rochester, New York. Currently Dr. Supalla is on sabbatical leave from the University of Rochester where he has the position of Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and of Linguistics. He directs the undergraduate American Sign Language Program and the Sign Language Research Center at the University. Dr. Supalla has published a number of articles and chapters on the linguistic structure of American Sign Language and has begun a line of work comparing the structure of various sign languages of the world and comparing early and modern ASL. He has co-produced a a documentary film Profile of Charles Krauel: A Deaf Filmmaker and has co-authored a book in press entitled Sign Language Archeology: Understanding History and Evolution of American Sign Language. He has been involved in producing prototype multimedia materials incorporating such linguistic data and utilizing the Internet technology to test their potentials. Dr. Supalla has spoken about his research at various conferences pertaining to Sign Language Research and Teaching, ASL Literature and Deaf History. Dr. Supalla is currently a visiting professor at the Department of ASL and Deaf Studies.
SPECIALIZATIONS Supalla's scholarship and research continues in five main areas: First, he is interested in the comparison between spoken language and signed language structure, to determine whether and in what ways the input-output modalities of language influence the nature of structural properities. Second, he is interested in universals of language, particularly with regard to cross-linguistic comparisons among sign languages of the world. Third, he is interested in the continuum from nonlinguistic gesture to gestural language, comparing gestures used by hearing people, “home sign” systems devised within individual families with 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. Fourth, he is interested in grammaticalization of gestural features during early stages in the evolution of signed languages. Fifth, he is interested in the online 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.
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