@ Research
Signed Language Psycholinguistics
- Bilingualism acquisition & development
- Cross-language access in signing populations
- Disfluency in ASL
Signed Language Psycholinguistics
Another topic of interest to me is the cognitive and linguistic processing in deaf signers. Deaf signers acquire and develop signed, written, and to some extent, spoken languages, but their experiences with those languages are highly variable due to inconsistent and great variation in the quantity and quality of linguistic input they receive. This presents a paradox to scientists, cognitive psychologists, educators, parents, and society regarding their understanding of how deaf people develop language, since they do not hear and cannot acquire spoken languages in the same way as non-deaf people do. Moving past the debate concerning whether or not signed languages are de facto natural languages, we are interested in the specifics of language processing in the minds of deaf people to better understand their language development, the impact of bilingualism, and to what extent do signed languages, due to their visual modality, shape the minds of deaf people as they learn to sign, read, write, and for some, speak.
![hero image](https://unm.edu/~ewilkins/splash/erinprofile.jpeg)
Erin Wilkinson
Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
Contact: /www.unm.edu/~ewilkins/.
©2023, All Rights Reserved: /www.unm.edu/~ewilkins/.