Watching the Birth of a Language
MacArthur Fellowship winner travels to Bedouin village to study development of new sign language

Ioana Patringenaru| Oct. 25, 2010

UC San Diego researcher Carol Padden with a Bedouin resident of the village of Al-Sayyid, where she is studying a sign language created by the villagers.

Carol Padden still remembers the day when, at age 8, she went from being a student in a school for deaf children to being a third-grader in a neighborhood public school. She said she felt like she had moved to another country.

Padden felt the same way decades later, when she and a team of Israeli and American colleagues drove to a small Bedouin village in the Negev desert. Everyone came from a different culture and was using a language Padden didn’t understand but wanted to learn. This time, she liked the feeling, she said.

She and her colleagues had come to the village to study a language still in its infancy. The results of their work led to ground-breaking findings about how languages form. These findings could shed light on how human language was born in prehistoric times.

For Padden, who has been on the UC San Diego faculty for 27 years, this isn’t unusual work. She has been a scholar of languages, of the languages of the deaf to be more precise, for three decades now. She helped show that sign languages are full-fledged communication systems, with their own grammar. She and husband Tom Humphries, also a deaf scholar at UCSD, have written landmark books about the history and culture of the deaf community in America.

Just last month, Padden was recognized for her work with a MacArthur Fellowship, better known as a “genius” grant. It comes with $500,000 in support over the next five years. She is still trying to process the news and figure out how to spend the funds, she said.

“I have a lot of crazy ideas I’ve bounced around for a long time,” Padden said.

The MacArthur award recognizes talented individuals in a variety of fields who have shown exceptional originality and dedication to their creative pursuits. This year’s recipients include Pulitzer-Prize winner Annette Gordon-Reed, author of “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” and David Simon, creator of the HBO series “The Wire.”

One of the villagers in Al-Sayyid with his daughter.

Padden embodies the perfect MacArthur award recipient, said Jeff Elman, dean of Social Sciences at UCSD.  He was so thrilled she received the award that he briefly waltzed her around his office when he got the news.

“She’s a gem; she has a heart of gold,” Elman said. “She’s a really good person, and when good things happen to good people, that’s special.”

“She’s one of a kind,” he added later. “She’s always broken the mold.”

Elman speaks from experience. More than three decades ago, Padden was his student at UCSD in a phonetics course for first-year graduate students. Having her in his class was a learning experience for him, he said. A good part of the course consisted in reproducing specific sounds and modeling the shape of the mouth required to make them. Elman wasn’t sure how Padden would do. She turned out to be his best student. She later explained that the class basically taught what she already had learned to do every day of her life in order to master spoken English.  

Padden earned her doctorate here and joined the faculty in the communication department 27 years ago. She is quick to say that her brand of research, which blends communication, linguistics and cognitive science, could only have happened at UCSD. “We have such a lively interdisciplinary tradition,” she said.  Here she also was always free to challenge commonly held ideas of how language is learned.

Padden’s award is a reflection of the campus as a whole, said Elman, the dean of Social Sciences. “We all can and should be proud,” he said. “I think we should all bask in the reflected glory.”

Family life

Carol Padden (left), with her daughter, Jacy, and
her husband Tom Humphries, also a deaf scholar
on the UC San Diego faculty.

Humphries, Padden’s husband, joined her at UCSD a few years after she was hired. His research focuses on training teachers who work with deaf children and studying how they perceive their students.

The two have been married almost 32 years and have a daughter, Jacy, who is a sophomore studying biology at the Claremont Colleges in the Los Angeles area. Jacy is hearing and bilingual in English and American Sign Language. “We wanted her to be involved in our life,” Padden said. “We have deaf friends, deaf family.”

Humphries and Padden met at Gallaudet University, a higher education institution in Washington, D.C., dedicated to educating the deaf and partially deaf. Gallaudet is where Padden’s parents, who are both deaf, spent most of their careers. Her mother taught English literature. Her father was a physical education instructor. The two are now 85 and 89 respectively and still doing well, Padden said.

Padden’s childhood

She realized in high school that she wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps, she said. But it wasn’t easy. Padden, who is partially deaf, was thrown into the mainstream of an American public school at age 8, in third-grade in the early 1960s. She knew some spoken English, but now had to compete with fluent speakers. She figured out that sitting in the front row helped her follow teachers’ lectures. She learned to read lips. Today, she speaks English with a slight intonation, similar to that of someone with a head cold. She can follow conversations between two to three people without an interpreter. She does use sign-language interpreters in the classes she teaches at UCSD because she can’t read the lips of students sitting in the back of the room.

As a child, Padden didn’t have access to the accommodations schools are now mandated to provide for deaf students, including interpreters, visual aids and computers. Luckily for her, at the end of the day, she could retreat to a loving and supportive family, where everyone used sign language and understood her plight, she said. Her older brother is also deaf.

There were other challenges too. Padden had to learn a new school culture, in addition to a new language. She still remembers vividly being the only child in her classroom without a textbook cover—and her teacher singling her out and scolding her for it.

Academic pursuits

Padden was able to graduate high school and go to college, where she finally got a sign-language interpreter. She chose California State University, Northridge because she knew the campus provided support for deaf students, she said. She transferred to Georgetown University as a sophomore. She then came to UC San Diego for graduate school.

Her parents didn’t understand her decision to study sign languages, she said. Padden wanted to study the differences between spoken and signed languages and between sign languages themselves and their grammar. She liked working on a controversial topic, she said. At the time, members of the deaf community were focused on proving that sign languages are indeed full-fledged languages and similar to spoken tongues.

The birth of a language

An overall view of the small Bedouin village of Al-Sayyid, in the Negev desert.

In her 27-year academic career at UCSD, Padden has been a pioneer, Elman said.  Her quest to understand languages better finally led her eight years ago to a small Bedouin village in Israel. She wasn’t sure what to expect. Sitting in a van with fellow researchers on the way to the village, named Al-Sayyid, she glimpsed a rural landscape, barren in spots, punctuated by sheep and hay in others. Many of the villagers herded sheep for a living. Few married outside of the community. As a result, the incidence of deafness in Al-Sayyid was much greater than in the general population. And ultimately, that’s what allowed an original sign language to blossom there.

Watching a spoken language being born is impossible, said Padden. All children are born into a culture and a family that quickly shapes the way they speak. But in Al-Sayyid, there was no school to teach sign language, so deaf members of the community came up with a language of their own.

Padden said she expected to find a rudimentary language, full of gesturing and pantomime. What she saw instead was a full-fledged language, with rapid, fluent signers. She and her colleagues go back at least twice a year to Al-Sayyid to follow the language’s progress.

Research results

Padden with fellow researchers, ready to head
out into the desert.

Their research already has shed light on some of the forces that drive a language’s formation. Community is one of them. All signers have to agree to use common language forms. They also have to adopt a common grammar. Culture is another force. Al-Sayyid’s language includes signs for the village’s everyday foods, such as hummus, olives and pita. In American Sign Language, a signer would have to fingerspell the name of these foods.

Al-Sayyid’s language also has helped researchers uncover differences between sign languages in other countries. For example, in Israeli Sign Language, when signers refer to small objects that you hold, such as toothbrushes, lipstick and mascara, they show how you hold them. But Al-Sayyid’s signers only show what the objects do. A researcher on Padden’s team noticed the difference. Then Padden realized American Sign Language resembles the Bedouin sign language. This turned out to be a distinction that can be found in other sign languages and divides them into two distinct groups.  This is particularly helpful to researchers because they’re having trouble finding differences between the world’s sign languages.

Research in Al-Sayyid also has shed light on one of the basic properties of language: how words are ordered. Signers in the village have adopted a word order that doesn’t come from either Arabic or Hebrew. That got researchers wondering whether it reflects a basic feature of emerging languages, and possibly the way the human brain organizes information.

“Bedouin sign language has offered us the opportunity to see something unique: the birth of a language,” said Elman, the dean of Social Sciences. “This has huge potential to answer the question of where language comes from.”