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IDGS
Institute of
German Sign Language and
Communication of the Deaf

Photo: UNI-HH

Invited presenters

Ronice Müller de Quadros

Ronice Müller de Quadros has been a professor and researcher at the Federal University of Santa Catarina since 2002 and joined the CNPQ (Brazilian National Science Foundation) as a sign language researcher in 2006. She holds a Masters degree (1995) and PhD (1999) in Linguistics from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, during which she spent 18 months at the University of Connecticut (1997-1998) researching the grammar of Libras and the acquisition of Libras and ASL. She was a visiting scholar at Gallaudet University and the University of Connecticut (2009-2010) investigating bimodal bilingual development in children (Libras/ Portuguese and  ASL / English), funded by the NIH and the CNPQ (2009-2014).  During the academic year 2015/16, Prof. Müller de Quadros developed her research into bimodal bilingual language acquisition further as a visiting professor at Harvard University (funded by the CNPQ). Some of her ongoing projects include founding the Nucleus of Acquistion of Sign Language (NALS) at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, where she has been gathering longitudinal and experimental data from deaf children and bimodal bilingual hearing people since 2002, and the Ministry of Culture, Porf. Müller de Quadros has been coordinating and consolidating the efforts dedicated to documenting Libras by creating a National Libras Corpus.

 

Gladys Tang

Gladys Tang is a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages at The Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as the director of The Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies. Her research interests focus on the theoretical study of sign language structure and its acquisition by deaf children. Going a step further, she investigates how research findings in her area of interest can be implemented in an educational setting that benefits both deaf and hearing children.

 

Jordan Fenlon

Jordan Fenlon is an Assistant Professor of British Sign Language in the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University. From 2009-2014, he worked as a research associatein the British Sign Language Corpus Projekt at DCAL, London, during which time he obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study Linguistics at Gallaudet University (2011-2012). After completing his PhD, he was awarded a prestigious Mellon Fellowship for postdoctoral reserarch at the Universtiy of Chicago (2014-16). His research interests focus on the sociolinguistics of signed languages as well as its implications for applied linguistics contexts such as sign language teaching.

 

Karen Emmorey

Karen Emmorey is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at San Diego State University and the Director of the Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr. Emmorey’s research focuses on what sign languages can reveal about the nature of human language, cognition, and the brain. She studies the processes involved in how deaf and hearing people produce and comprehend sign language and how these processes are represented in the brain. Her research interests also include bimodal bilingualism (i.e., sign-speech bilingualism) and the neurocognitive underpinnings of reading skill in profoundly deaf adults.