Current Lab Team

Collaborators

Students

Ted Supalla

  •  PhD, University of California at San Diego, 1982
  •  Professor, Department of Neurology, Psychology, and Linguistics
  •  Director, Sign Language Research Laboratory
​My research involves three main lines of work. First, I am interested in universals of language, including the comparison between spoken languages and signed languages, as well as the similarities and differences among sign languages themselves.

Second, I am interested in how sign languages are formed. Part of this work examines the continuum from nonlinguistic gesture to gestural language, comparing gesture as used by hearing people, "home sign" systems devised within families who have deaf members, and full sign languages such as ASL, to determine where and how linguistic properties appear in the evolution from nonlinguistic to linguistic use of the same modalities.

Third, I am interested in the on-line processing of ASL, including studies of sentence comprehension and memory as well as fMRI studies asking what parts of the brain are activated during visual-gestural language processing.

Betsy Hicks McDonald

  •  PhD, University of Buffalo, 1981
  •  Research Associate, Department of Neurology

I assist Professor Supalla in cross-linguistic research on ASL and other signed and spoken languages. In addition, I am interested in pedagogical techniques in bilingual education. Previously, I designed and taught English-language courses with Deaf students. In this context, I designed accessible techniques for natural acquisition of English academic vocabulary. Within the SLRC research program, the exploration of historical trends in ASL pedagogy, polyglossia and metalanguage relate to this interest. My current professional interests include ASL dialectology and historical and regional dialects of ASL.

Matt Malzkuhn

  • Bachelor's and Master's in Deaf Studies - Cultural Studies, Gallaudet University
  • PhD in Cultural Studies, George Mason University
  • Research Specialist, Sign Language Research Lab
In the Sign Language Research Lab, I have many responsibilities including video collection, coding, and analysis of data. I received my BA and MA from Gallaudet University in Deaf Studies with a thesis in the area of Cultural Studies on the emerging concept of deaf space. I researched how deaf people purchase and renovate homes to accommodate their ways of being. I am currently working on my doctorate's degree in Cultural Studies at George Mason University.  I am focusing on the fields of political economy and performance theory of deaf people as they overlap. My research draws on evidence from deaf home films, analyzing the documentation of particular aspects of deaf people's lives, such as class issues, identity, and its politics. 

Tory Sampson

  • Bachelor's in Archaeology and Anthropology, Boston University
  • Lab Manager, Sign Language Research Lab

​I manage and supervise ongoing projects, making sure that each project is proceeding smoothly and in a timely fashion. I assist in the lab with translating from ASL to English for the ASL Masters videos in the HSLDB, overseeing the lab website, and building coding systems for elicitation tests. Currently, I am the project coordinator for the development of the MOOC collaboration between the CNDLS team at Georgetown and the SLRL team. For my future research opportunities, I am interested in how the brain develops with various educational learning methods and linguistic exposure that one acquires throughout the developmental phases of childhood in different schools. Furthermore, I would like to research how that translates into social behavior during early and late adulthood. 

Gabriel Arellano

  • Bachelor of Arts in Signed Language Linguistics and minor in Anthropology, University of New Mexico
  • Master of Arts in ASL & Deaf Studies, Gallaudet University
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As a research specialist in the Sign Language Research Lab, I contribute to a corpus development project on early ASL, compile quantitative metadata on research questions, and also caption the films with glosses of the historical ASL signs. In addition, I provide technical support for fieldwork, transferring and digitizing video data.
My interests include the documentation of indigenous sign languages from different countries. I received training in this area from University College London.  I am also interested in raising awareness of sign languages as heritage languages, along with their roles in literacy development and STEM learning.