ABSTRACT
Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima pioneered investigations into areas central to the
relation of language, mind, and brain. They have an infectious fascination and delight
with ASL as a three-dimensional language that sculpts the air with sweeps of the hand
and twists of the wrists, all the while punctuated by a myriad of facial expressions
complexly coupled to sequences of body positionings and gestures of the limbs. Ursula
Bellugi and Ed Klima didn’t stop with simply a linguistic description of American Sign
Language (ASL). For them, language in space provided a natural segue to bigger
questions of how language in all its varied modalities of expression is organized and how
it is represented in the brain. They demonstrated unequivocally that language is not
restricted to the auditory-vocal modality and that the left cerebral hemisphere in humans
has an innate predisposition for language independent of language modality (Corina,
Vaid, & Bellugi, 1992; Hickok, Bellugi, & Klima, 1996; Poizner, Klima, & Bellugi,
1987). Their studies generated a fertile testing ground for competing explanations of the
brain’s organization for language, how the brain comes to be so organized, and how it can
or cannot be modified. Our own research has benefitted greatly from their insightful
thinking and clear focus on the biological foundations of language. The work presented
here on what is to be learned from the study of errors produced by signers with
Parkinson’s disease follows in the footsteps of Bellugi and Klima’s groundbreaking
research that brought language in another modality to the forefront of research in both
theoretical linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. We hope to add one more piece to the
puzzle of how language and movement are represented in the human brain.
