BRIEF BIO

Carol Neidle, now Professor Emerita of Linguistics, was a Professor of Linguistics and French at Boston University (BU) between September of 1982 and June of 2023. She taught courses in general linguistics and French linguistics. She is also the Director of the American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project (ASLLRP). Her research interests include syntactic theory and the syntactic structure of American Sign Language (ASL).

She was hired initially into the French section of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at BU in 1982, after completing her BA in Linguistics at Yale University, her MA in French over several summers at Middlebury College, and her PhD in Linguistics at MIT with a dissertation on Russian syntax. She also taught at the Middlebury College French School over the summers between 1983 and 1988.

Professor Neidle created a Linguistics program at BU in the mid-1980’s and has overseen its gradual expansion and its evolution into a full-fledged department in 2018. She directed the various incarnations of the program and chaired the new Department of Linguistics through June of 2020. Her research since the early 1990’s has focused on American Sign Language (ASL). She has been engaged in collaborative research with computer scientists interested in sign language recognition from video. With support from the National Science Foundation, she has been involved, in parallel, in developing and sharing linguistically annotated video corpora, in developing interfaces for making these data available on the Web, and in using these data for research in ASL linguistics and sign language recognition.

 

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