ABSTRACT
It gives me immense pleasure to contribute to this volume for Ursie and Ed. For almost
15 years now, we have shared coffee and cookies, numerous hours chatting and
discussing, laughing and writing. When I first came to the lab as a postdoc, I was
interested in how Deaf infants make the transition from first using facial expression to
convey and interpret emotion (similar to hearing infants) to acquiring American Sign
Language (ASL) and also using facial expression as part of the nonmanual grammar. The
multifunctionality of facial expression in ASL, that is, that it serves both grammatical and
affective roles, appeared to be a unique opportunity to explore the relations between these
two communicative systems, affect or emotion and language. This journey has been
profitable and the question has broadened to include numerous intersections of language
and the expression of emotion. Ursie, Ed, and I have continued to work on some of these
together, for example, affective expression and evaluative language in narratives of
children with Williams syndrome (Bellugi, Losh, Reilly, & Anderson, 1998; Reilly,
Klima, & Bellugi, 1990). But in this chapter, I would like to focus on the original
question and our first domain of collaboration: the acquisition of grammatical facial
behaviors in ASL and its relation to emotional expression. Specifically, in this chapter,
we examine how children integrate language and emotion to signal perspective changes
in narratives. Before we begin, however, a brief overview of grammatical facial
expression in ASL might be helpful.
