ABSTRACT
The academic year 1965/66 was a momentous one for me. I started protesting against the
war in Vietnam, I got my first job as a linguist, I saw Noam Chomsky for the first time,
and I was first introduced to the work of Ursula Bellugi. In an otherwise execrable psy-
cholinguistics course, she gave a guest lecture about her work on language acquisition that
truly excited and inspired me. This was what psycholinguistics should be about! Little did I imagine then as a lowly undergraduate that 5 years later I would have the opportunity to
work with her as a fellow pioneer in the field of sign language studies. From the begin-
ning of my 3 years in her laboratory (1970-1974), I was fascinated by such questions as
the effects of channel on language structure, the commonalities between signed and
spoken languages, and what sign language structure can tell us about language in general.
The fact that that interest has persisted for the 25 years since I left serves as a tribute to
