As Ursula Bellugi delivers her talk, an expert in sign language translates for her. The signer's hands hurtle furiously through the air, fingers dancing as though possessed. They swoop through the air, puncture it with staccato stabs, furl and unfurl to form shapes in space. The signer's face is equally animated. Expressions flit rapidly across it, conveying nuance, inflection, and grammatical detail unimaginable to a casual, nonsigning observer. And all at blinding speed.
Bellugi, a bustling neuroscientist, is making a point: anything she can say, the signer can "say." Sign is bona fide language. It's not mime, not a poor, pidgin derivative of spoken tongues--it's a richly endowed language in and of itself. And it is Bellugi herself who over the past two decades has convinced a doubting world of that reality.
But as director of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California, and as the world's expert in the neurobiology of American Sign Language ("She's the founder of the field, the most important person in the field, the grandmother of the field," as one researcher puts it), the 63-year-old Bellugi is interested in sign for more than its own sake. Sign offers her a window into the brain, a means of discovering the biological foundations of language. She and other investigators around the country are pinpointing areas of the brain that are uniquely suited for linguistic tasks. In fact, they are suggesting that the capacity for language may well be innate, genetically determined, one of our defining characteristics as human beings.
Bellugi's fascination with the roots of language began in 1968, soon after she received her doctorate in linguistics and psychology from Harvard. Jonas Salk invited her to start a lab at the institute that bears his name, a stark concrete complex overlooking the Pacific. At Harvard she'd investigated the ways in which children learn the dizzyingly complex underlying rules of spoken language. Now, with her husband and fellow linguist, Edward Klima, she began to think about language in a neurobiological context. How, she wondered, was language processed in the brain?
In those days language was thought to be contingent on the ability to speak, the product of humans' ability to utter sounds. So Bellugi decided to compare the way hearing children learn to speak with the way deaf children learn to sign. By comparing language with what seemed like a completely different system of communication, she hoped to tease out differences between the two. "We knew nothing about sign," recalls Bellugi. "We just thought comparing speech with sign was a theoretically interesting question, one that might move us toward the biology of language."
