ABSTRACT
When the psycholinguistic study of American Sign Language (ASL) was in its infancy, I,
as a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego, was invited by Ursula
Bellugi to come to The Salk Institute for a discussion about short-term memory and sign
language processing. That initial meeting resulted in a collaboration with Ursula Bellugi
and Ed Klima that lasted more than 2 years. During that time, I became convinced that
the study of sign language processing had important implications for the development of
theories of language processing and the application of those theories to the education of
Deaf children. This chapter takes a new look at issues related to my first work in sign
language research-issues involved in the comparison of the early stages of processing of
signed and spoken language.
