Richard P Meier

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor of Linguistics and Department Chair at University of Texas at Austin

In the early decades of the 19th century, the deaf population in the eastern US and Canada was distributed across a vast area. After the 1817 founding of the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, CT and the subsequent establishment of schools for the deaf in New York City (NYSD), Philadelphia, and many other US states, hundreds of deaf st...

The deaf population of Martha’s Vineyard has fascinated scholars for more than a century since Alexander Graham Bell’s research on the frequent occurrence of deafness there and since Groce’s book on the island’s signing community (Groce, N. E. (1985). Everyone here spoke sign language: Hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard. Cambridge, MA: Harvar...

The visual-gestural modality affords its users simultaneous movement of several independent articulators and thus lends itself to simultaneous encoding of information. Much research has focused on the fact that sign languages coordinate two manual articulators in addition to a range of non-manual articulators to present different types of linguisti...

How may the structure of a new linguistic community shape language emergence and change? The 1817 founding of the U.S.'s first school for the deaf, the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, heralded profound changes in the lives of deaf North Americans. We report the demographics of the early signing community at ASD through...

Acquisition of pronominal forms by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) continues to garner significant attention due to the unusual ways that such children produce and comprehend them. In particular, pronoun reversal errors (e.g., using the 2nd-person pronoun “you” to refer to oneself) have been noted in the speech of children with ASD sin...

Young children are thought to play a unique role in the emergence and evolution of language. In research on language acquisition by a deaf child of late learners of ASL as well as in research on the emergence of new signed languages, young children have shown the ability to impose systematicity on relatively less systematic linguistic input (Single...

In discussions of the history of American Sign Language (ASL), a village sign language—Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL)—has been identified as a possible contributor to ASL and to its differentiation from French Sign Language (LSF; cf. Groce 1985: 73-74, Lane et al 2011: 76, Poole Nash 2015: 611). On this account, MVSL contributed to ASL thro...

Palm orientation reversal errors (e.g., producing the ‘bye-bye’ gesture with palm facing inward rather than outward as is customary in American culture) have been documented in the signing of deaf and hearing children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and in the imitation of gestures by signing and non-signing children with ASD. However the sourc...

There is an ongoing debate about whether there exists a grammatical distinction between first-person and non-first person in signed languages, namely American Sign Language (ASL). The debate has been based largely on different analyses of pointing signs but minimally on the person-marking of directional verbs for object. We present an analysis of 9...

The parts of the body that are used to produce and perceive signed languages (the hands, face, and visual system) differ from those used to produce and perceive spoken languages (the vocal tract and auditory system). In this paper we address two factors that have important consequences for sign language acquisition. First, there are three types of...

This paper is a position statement on reproducible research in linguistics, including data citation and attribution, that represents the collective views of some 41 colleagues. Reproducibility can play a key role in increasing verification and accountability in linguistic research, and is a hallmark of social science research that is currently unde...

Purpose We present the first study of echolalia in deaf, signing children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We investigate the nature and prevalence of sign echolalia in native-signing children with ASD, the relationship between sign echolalia and receptive language, and potential modality differences between sign and speech. Method Seventeen d...

We report the first study on pronoun use by an under-studied research population, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exposed to American Sign Language from birth by their deaf parents. Personal pronouns cause difficulties for hearing children with ASD, who sometimes reverse or avoid them. Unlike speech pronouns, sign pronouns are indexica...

The ubiquity of index-finger pointing, and its early emergence in child development, has suggested that such pointing may be biologically-determined. However, cross-cultural variation in the form of pointing has also been noted, with some observations of middle-finger pointing. Here we examine the limited corpus of publically-available video data o...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

The sign INSTITUTE is the source of a family of ASL signs that are used to refer to residential schools for deaf children and to other institutions. The members of the INSTITUTE sign family—although initialized—are well-established within the Deaf community and, importantly, are used to refer to highly-valued aspects of Deaf culture. This is true d...

Signed languages display a variety of pointing signs that serve the functions of deictic and anaphoric pronouns, possessive and reflexive pronouns, demonstratives, locatives, determiners, body part labels, and verb agreement. We consider criteria for determining the linguistic status of pointing signs. Among those criteria are conventionality, inde...

Families with deaf parents and hearing children are often bilingual and bimodal, with both a spoken language and a signed one in regular use among family members. When interviewed, 13 American hearing adults with deaf parents reported widely varying language practices, sign language abilities, and social affiliations with Deaf and Hearing communiti...

Research papers on sign languages place deaf signers front and center. Their faces fill the drawings and photographs that give papers on signed languages such a different look from those on spoken languages. Often enough, linguists—deaf or hearing—know the signers in those pictures. But how well do linguists know the communities to which those sign...

In signed languages, the arguments of verbs can be marked by a system of verbal modification that has been termed "agreement" (more neutrally, "directionality"). Fundamental issues regarding directionality remain unresolved and the phenomenon has characteristics that call into question its analysis as agreement. We conclude that directionality mark...

Background: Poor imitation of other people's bodily movements (gestures and/or actions) is one characteristic of people with autism (Smith & Bryson, 1994; Williams et al., 2004). However, researchers have failed to reach a consensus about the exact nature of this imitation deficit. Some researchers (e.g., Rogers et al., 1996; Green et al., 2002) ha...

Essays reflecting the influence of the versatile linguist David M. Perlmutter, covering topics from theoretical morphology to sign language phonology. Anyone who has studied linguistics in the last half-century has been affected by the work of David Perlmutter. One of the era's most versatile linguists, he is perhaps best known as the founder (with...

This chapter begins with an overview of the methods which have been used in research on phonetic and phonological development in signing children. It then turns to a consideration of certain properties of signs which are key to an understanding of the phonetics of signs, and which will also prove important to an understanding of the current literat...

Carlota S. Smith was a key figure in linguistic research and a pioneering woman in generative linguistics. This selection of papers focuses on the research into tense, aspect, and discourse that Smith completed while Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Smith, who died in 2007, was a trailblazer in her field whose broad in...

Review of Wendy Sandler & Diane Lillo-Martin. (2006). Sign Language and Linguistic Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xxi + 547 pp. Trevor Johnston & Adam Schembri. (2007). Australian Sign Language: An Introduction to Sign Language Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xiv + 323 pp.

The two major language modalities—the visual-gestural modality of sign and the oral-aural modality of speech—offer different resources to the infant word learner and impose differing constraints on the infant's production of lexical items. For example, the attraction of iconicity to signing children could be such that their errors would reveal litt...

This article presents an analysis of the functional roles of "baby signing" in three hearing families in the United States, as well as a discussion of the social and ideological implications of the practice. Baby signing fits neatly into the parenting ideologies prevalent in the professional class in the United States that value early communication...

The realisation that signed languages are true languages is one of the great discoveries of linguistic research. The work of many sign language researchers has revealed deep similarities between signed and spoken languages in their structure, acquisition and processing, as well as differences, arising from the differing articulatory and perceptual...

The realisation that signed languages are true languages is one of the great discoveries of linguistic research. The work of many sign language researchers has revealed deep similarities between signed and spoken languages in their structure, acquisition and processing, as well as differences, arising from the differing articulatory and perceptual...

The realisation that signed languages are true languages is one of the great discoveries of linguistic research. The work of many sign language researchers has revealed deep similarities between signed and spoken languages in their structure, acquisition and processing, as well as differences, arising from the differing articulatory and perceptual...

The realisation that signed languages are true languages is one of the great discoveries of linguistic research. The work of many sign language researchers has revealed deep similarities between signed and spoken languages in their structure, acquisition and processing, as well as differences, arising from the differing articulatory and perceptual...

The realisation that signed languages are true languages is one of the great discoveries of linguistic research. The work of many sign language researchers has revealed deep similarities between signed and spoken languages in their structure, acquisition and processing, as well as differences, arising from the differing articulatory and perceptual...

The realisation that signed languages are true languages is one of the great discoveries of linguistic research. The work of many sign language researchers has revealed deep similarities between signed and spoken languages in their structure, acquisition and processing, as well as differences, arising from the differing articulatory and perceptual...

This is a book primarily about signed languages, but it is not a book targeted just at the community of linguists and psycholinguists who specialize in research on signed languages. It is instead a book in which data from signed languages are recruited in pursuit of the goal of answering a fundamental question about the nature of human language: wh...

As the first book of its kind, this volume with contributions from many well known scholars brings together some of the most recent original work on sign language acquisition in children learning a variety of different signed languages (i.e., Brazilian Sign Language, American SL, SL of the Netherlands, British SL, SL of Nicaragua, and Italian SL)....

We explore the predictors of early mastery versus error in children's acquisition of American Sign Language. We hypothesize that the most frequent values for a particular parameter in prelinguistic gesture will be the most frequent in early signs and the most likely sources of substitution when signing children make errors. Analyses of data from a...

DAVID BIRDSONG (ed.). Second language acquisition and the critical period hypothesis. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. Pp. x+191. - - Volume 28 Issue 1 - Richard P. Meier

Many of the world's 6000 to 7000 spoken languages are threatened with extinction, as Bernice Wuethrich discusses in her News Focus article “Learning the world's languages—before they vanish” (19 May, p. [1156][1]), and their disappearance will cripple attempts to probe the limits of linguistic

One of the most striking facts about exchange errors in speech is that open class items are exchanged, but closed class items are not. This article argues that a pattern analogous to that in speech errors also appears in intrasentential code-switching. Intrasentential code-switching is the alternating use of two languages in a sentence by bilingual...

Early babbling has been characterized as being fundamentally a mandibular oscillation: the infant's repeated lowering and raising of its mandible yields a perceived contrast between consonants produced in a closed vocal tract configuration and vowels produced with an open tract. We wondered whether babblers produce rhythmic mandibular oscillations...

An infant girl (JD) was assessed as having a mild‐to‐moderate sensorineural hearing loss in her left ear and a moderate‐to‐severe sensorineural loss in her right ear, based on results of auditory brain‐stem response (ABR) at age 3 months and soundfieldtesting at 4, 5, and 9 months (Better ear PTA=55 dB HL). JD was fitted with hearing aids binaurall...

Within the phonological literature on ASL, there are at least three competing proposals as to the fundamental segment types in that language: (1) movements (M) and holds (H), (2) movements and locations (L), and (3) movements and positions (P). This chapter presents several differences between the primary language modalities that might affect the t...

Recent research has examined the early stages of language development in signed and spoken language. In this paper we discuss claims that, in the timing of early language milestones, there is an advantage for the acquisition of signed languages. In particular, we will review the evidence that the emergence of the first signs and of the first twosig...

Several previous studies using miniature language methodology have shown that the acquisition of syntax is facilitated by language input that incorporates cues to sentence phrase structure. These studies have examined effects of LOCAL cues, such as prosody or function words, which are physically identifiable aspects of input and which directly indi...

The linguistic input to language learning is usually thought to consist of simple strings of words. We argue that input must also include information about how words group into syntactic phrases. Natural languages regularly incorporate correlated cues to phrase structure, such as prosody, function words, and concord morphology. The claim that such...

In American Sign Language (ASL), many verbs inflected for subject and object agreement are highly iconic. Two models of the acquisition of verb agreement are compared. The first assumes that children's acquisition of agreement is guided by the global iconic properties of such verbs and the second assumes that acquisition is sensitive to the interna...

In this study we examine the roles of semantic reference and of grammatical morphology in the learning of an artificial syntax. Subjects assigned to one of three training conditions viewed sentences from a miniature phrase structure language. In the reference field condition, subjects saw sentences which each referred to an array of geometric figur...

briefly describe the structure of the language / [reviews] the literature on the acquisition of ASL [American Sign Language] descriptive sketch of American Sign Language / overall course of development / children cognitive pacesetting of language development / linguistic pacesetting of cognitive development / suggestions for further study / inp...

Two possible iconic models of the acquisition of verb agreement in American Sign Language (ASL) are developed and contrasted with a third, morphological account of the acquisition of this aspect of ASL. Additionally, data from spontaneous conversation of deaf children who have deaf parents are considered to test these three models. An iconic model...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1982. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 153-159). Microfilm. s

This dissertation represents the first systematic study of the sign language of deaf children with autism. The signing of such children is of particular interest because of the unique ways that some of the known impairments of autism are likely to interact with sign language. In particular, the visual-spatial modality of sign requires signers to un...