Deaf in America: Padden speaks on sign languages and gesture June 15, 16
Well-known author and advocate for the Deaf community Dr. Carol Padden will be on the UND campus on June 15 and 16 as part of the Summer Institute of Linguistics colloquium series.
Carol A. Padden is an American academic, author, and lecturer. She is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, where she has been teaching since 1983. She was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow and a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow, and is widely-known for her many books and articles, both academic and popular, on Deaf culture, ASL and other sign languages.
Dr. Padden’s main areas of research are language emergence, sign language structure, and cultural life in Deaf communities. Being Deaf herself, she plays a central role in promoting research on sign languages around the world and in shaping policy and practices that promote the full participation of Deaf people in society.
As part of the SIL-UND 2016 Summer Colloquia Series, Dr. Padden will give a two-part presentation on her recent research. Although sign languages are natural languages in their own right, with their own grammatical structure independent of spoken languages, Padden’s research has uncovered some aspects of sign languages that have commonalities with co-speech gesture in spoken languages—thus providing evidence for common cognitive structures that underlie all languages, both spoken and signed.
Her lectures will take place in Merrifield Hall 300 on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, June 15 and 16, from 8 to 9 p.m. She will present in ASL with English interpretation provided. The UND and Grand Forks communities are cordially invited.
The Summer Institute of Linguistics is a regular program on the UND campus, now in its 65th year, in which people from around the world converge on Grand Forks to offer an intensive program of linguistic courses designed for people who plan to do linguistic, literacy and translation work with local language communities throughout the world.
