For Naomi Caselli, director of the Deaf Center at Boston University, the crisis of language deprivation among deaf and hard of hearing children is an emergency.

Deaf Studies

Making the World More Accessible for Sign Language Users

Her whole life, Naomi Caselli, whose first languages are American Sign Language and English, has wrestled with complex questions about language. At BU, she’s turned them into research questions.

From a young age, Naomi Caselli has grappled with the ethical complexities of language—particularly, American Sign Language (ASL). 

Caselli’s father, Raymond Kenney, is deaf, and her mother, Nancy Berlove, is hearing, so Caselli grew up learning ASL and English as her first languages. In any given scenario, Caselli’s family were considering questions such as: Who knows sign language and who doesn’t? Who’s using English? Should Caselli and her friends use English in Caselli’s home, when they’re learning it in school?

Kenney and Berlove communicated openly with their children about these matters, especially when it came to their children interpreting for Kenney—how that might impact his independence, the power imbalance that created for their children, what it meant for them to join decidedly adult conversations.

“Language was always a big part of our family dynamic. The power that comes along with language was always a big part of it,” says Caselli, who is now a Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development associate professor of deaf education and director of the Deaf Center. The center—among the biggest in the US focused on deaf people, and sign language in particular—is a hub for deaf and signing researchers, educators, creators, and technologists, designed to promote sign languages and Deaf cultures, and to build a world in which the human right to accessible language is realized for all deaf children. 

According to the 2023 American Community Survey, approximately 2 percent of the US population identifies as deaf or hard of hearing, and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders has found that over 15 percent of adults report having some difficulty hearing. Then there is this striking statistic: while 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, very few of those parents learn ASL. 

For Caselli—as for many in families that include both deaf and hearing members—the questions her family weighed were formative, if weighty, quandaries for a child. They were questions Caselli would keep coming back to, again and again, throughout her life. Today, she is one of the nation’s foremost ASL researchers and studies how early language experiences shape how deaf children learn language, how the sign language lexicon is structured, learned, and processed, and, more recently, how we can responsibly use AI to make the world more accessible to sign language users.

A Language—and Education—Emergency

After attending an all-hearing college for her undergraduate education, Caselli describes feeling surprisingly “unmoored” from the Deaf community and culture she grew up alongside—“something that’s kind of my own culture, but also not really my own culture, as a hearing person.” She took ASL courses to refine her sign language and became an ASL/English interpreter. Eventually, Caselli found herself interpreting for a deaf professor’s lab meeting. He was researching the kinds of things she had long wondered about—the dynamics of power and language in the signing community—and she was hooked. She started talking with other researchers doing similar work and eventually connected with Robert Hoffmeister at Boston University. At the time, he was heading the Deaf Studies program at BU; now, he is an associate professor emeritus of Deaf Studies.

“I emailed him and said, ‘I want to do research at the intersection of cognitive psychology, linguistics, and deaf education,’” says Caselli, who went on get master’s degrees in deaf education and in psychology at BU, returning after earning her PhD at Tufts University to join the BU Wheelock faculty. “And that’s 100 percent what I do now.”

Much of Caselli’s work centers on the importance of language acquisition at a very young age. Her father was held back for many years because of a requirement that he speak, not sign—a demand that came from misguided, if well-meaning, advice from doctors, teachers, speech pathologists, and others. He excelled in math and engineering, and later learned to read, but was dealt a disservice by the educational paradigm of the time, with its emphasis on speech and disregard for sign language, says Caselli. Kenney didn’t learn ASL until college. 

According to Caselli, not enough has changed since Kenney’s childhood in the 1960s. Language deprivation remains a real problem for deaf children. Many kids today are still having much the same experience that Kenney did. “It is not a thing of the past,” Caselli says. 

In a recent paper, Caselli and her colleagues write that language deprivation—lacking fully accessible language input—“is a phenomenon so rare among hearing children that it is seldom seen outside famous cases of severe developmental pathology or criminal abuse or neglect, and yet so common among [deaf and hard of hearing] children and adults that it often fails to provoke the alarm it deserves.”

Still, today, the prevailing narrative in early childhood education tends to be that it’s only through speech—not sign—that children can reach their full potential. Caselli’s research, which has been cited thousands of times, serves as a bulwark against this tide of what she says is misguided policy. Her research has shown: the critical importance of making sign language more accessible to deaf and hard of hearing children from a young age; that deaf and hard of hearing children who have hearing parents can develop age-level vocabulary skills when they have early exposure to a sign language; and that, while ASL interpreters for children in school may be an effective accommodation for deaf students, they don’t replace robust language education and access. 

The Deaf Center and its academic counterpart, Wheelock’s Deaf Studies program, also run a pair of highly successful social media accounts. Through their Instagram accounts—BUDeafCenter and BUDeafStudies—researchers and creators are reframing how academic research can reach, represent, and, most importantly, empower deaf and hard of hearing children and those who care for them.

Caselli and her colleagues have embraced the ability of social media to increase the reach and impact of their work.

“So many of our systems are just set up in such a way now that they obliterate deaf people, and deaf kids in particular,” Caselli says. “It happened to my dad; it happens to so many people. I couldn’t see that, and just do nothing. It is an emergency to me, to deaf people, but it can feel like the hearing world is just chugging along like everything’s fine.” 

“Not a Zero-Sum Game”

Caselli still wrestles with some of the same ethical questions she has her whole life. 

“How do I, as a hearing person, work on these systemic issues in a way that’s not taking up too much space? How do I do this work without taking over and making the narrative about me? These things aren’t straightforward,” she says, noting that even this interview with The Brink is one that centers her experience, as well as the broader systemic challenges she’s helping to tackle.

And while she’s the first to admit that this is a complex, nuanced, sometimes messy process, she’s trying to navigate it gracefully. 

“I try to think about ways that I can use the opportunities that are afforded to me to create more, so that it’s not a zero-sum game,” Caselli says. “I’ve focused a lot on getting research grants, because those allow me to hire junior, deaf, emerging scientists, to support their careers so that they can go out and get my job, so that we have the next generation of deaf people who are leading this work, so that it’s not all hearing people like it has been for all this time.” 

The uncertainty of our current national grant-funding landscape makes this all the more urgent, Caselli says. The relative economic precarity for junior scientists means that, with each cut, “we’re at risk of losing an entire generation of talent,” she says. 

So, here’s another question Caselli faces: What next? 

“It may be naive optimism, but the thing is, I’ve seen small groups of people—people who do not have huge positions of power—make extraordinary change,” she says. “The Deaf community is small, and it seems like everything is stacked up against deaf people. But, because it’s small, it means that sometimes, you can get traction in ways that are really meaningful. It was only my parents’ generation that set up sign language interpretation as a field. It was the advocacy of actual people who got the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] passed. These things can happen. It’s not insurmountable.” 

Caselli’s research is primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, with additional support from the Administration for Community Living.