Naomi Caselli

New Center Promotes Universal Sign Language Access

One of the cool things about sign language, says Naomi Caselli, is that in order to listen to it, you have to be looking at it. 

“It’s unlike spoken languages, where we don’t have any overt signals of whether a kid, for example, is paying attention to what they’re hearing,” says Caselli, an associate professor in the Deaf Studies and Deaf Education programs at BU Wheelock. (As anyone who has young children or worked with them can attest: more often than not, their attention is elsewhere while an adult is talking.) “But in ASL, you can tell. If a child isn’t looking, they’re not getting it. And so that’s a really cool window into understanding how kids learn to manage their attention.” 

That deep dive into visual attention is one of many such research projects underway at BU Wheelock’s new Center on Sign Language and Deaf Education. The Deaf Center, which opened last year, is “a hub for Deaf and signing researchers, educators, creators, and technologists 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 its website. 

Center faculty include Amy Lieberman, an associate professor of literacy and literacy education who runs the Language Acquisition & Visual Attention Lab; Franklin Jones, Jr., a lecturer in Deaf studies who studies Black American Sign Language; and Emily Kubicek, a data scientist who studies the relationship between spatial cognition and sign language use. Other researchers, including Caselli, are engaged in projects such as building out sign language technologies similar to what Siri and Alexa are for spoken language. A visiting professor is studying Nicaraguan Sign Language, which was only developed within the last 40 years by young people who needed to communicate in the absence of a standard sign language.

The center has partnered with almost every Deaf K–12 school in the US to help support the kind of specialized curricula development the schools require. 

“Educational approaches that work for hearing kids often don’t work for Deaf kids,” Caselli says. “You can’t teach reading, for example, by having kids sound things out.” 

Instead, the center can leverage its research to help schools build out strategies that do work. And in the case of learning to read, the first step is establishing a solid foundation in ASL, which isn’t always a guarantee for Deaf children, many of whom are encouraged to learn spoken language instead of ASL. From there, children can take what they know in one language and essentially transfer it to another one. Learning to read, therefore, becomes more like learning a second language. 

With its broad approach, the Deaf Center stands out from the college’s Deaf Studies program in that it “captures everything that doesn’t necessarily relate to a degree program,” Caselli says, while also engaging the Deaf community in Boston and beyond. 

“We’re the biggest research center on Deaf people and sign language in particular,” she says. “We’re not interested in trying to make deaf kids hear. We’re interested in language and access to sign language. 

There are a couple of other schools that do research in this space, but none of them are an R1 institution [higher education institutions that produce a high volume of research]. And that means that we can have a different kind of impact.”