ABSTRACT
Our first contact with Ursula Bellugi and Ed Klima came in the early 1970s when I
(Penny) began my Ph.D. studies at Berkeley, with the intention of writing a dissertation
on sign language. My advisor, Dan Slobin, recommended that I make contact with his old
Harvard classmate, Ursie, who was just setting up a lab for sign language studies at the
Salk Institute. The result for me was an exciting period of research with Ursie’s team at
Salk. Thüring was studying in the music department at Berkeley at the time and in his
trips down to San Diego was included in the parties and dinners that Ursie and Ed would
somehow find the energy to put on after working at least 14 hours straight on linguistics.
We discovered that all four of us shared an interest in music, from different points of
view (being a conductor, being related to a conductor, having been a dancer, etc.).
Thüring and I have finally managed, after 25 years, to find a project on which a sign
