ABSTRACT
When Ursula Bellugi began her studies of American Sign Language (ASL) in 1970, she
gathered around her a congenial cohort of graduate students from UCSD’s departments of
linguistics and psychology plus talented collaborators: Bonnie Gough translated the
English sentences we pitched at her into ASL, Susan Fischer added analysis, and Ed Kli-
ma raised problems. Ursie, then as now, did everything and ran everything. I have one
sharp snapshot in my mind’s eye of the earliest days of the weekly research meeting: In a
not-yet-furnished suite of rooms in The Salk Institute, several of us sat at a round table on
brightly colored little plastic stools shaped like angular hourglasses. On the table were
pads of paper that we filled with our puzzlements and in the center were shards of
Hershey’s Special Dark chocolate that we communally munched. My colleagues who
study false memory have made me cautious. After visiting Ursie’s new lab last spring and
discovering her mental album did not contain the same snapshot of the old lab, I was
inspired to check with a couple of other members of the group. The chocolate was
confirmed immediately, and the stools eventually (by a member of the next cohort).
