Lab Director
Dr. Natasha Abner
Dr. Abner’s research interests include sign languages, morpho-syntax, the syntax-semantics interface, language development and emergence in communities and individuals.
She is currently leading a three-year project funded by the National Science Foundation on the structure of sign language and gesture in deaf signers, hearing non-signers, and hearing students learning American Sign Language as a second language.
Her research on the histories of sign languages and the relationship between them has been published in Science and was featured in Popular Science and other venues.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Dr. Timothy Hadjah
Dr. Hadjah’s research lies at the intersection of sign language linguistics, Deaf studies, and sociolinguistics, with a deep commitment to documenting and analyzing the diversity and dynamics of African sign languages, especially Ghanaian Sign Language
Timothy earned his Ph.D. in Sign Language Linguistics from Leiden University, with a dissertation titled Understanding Ghanaian Sign Language(s): History, Linguistics, and Ideology. He currently contributes to the NSF-funded project “Event Description in Sign Language and Gesture”,
Dr. Hadjah is also the founder of the Centre for Sign Language and Deaf Literacy in Ghana (csldl.org), an organization promoting sign language awareness and Deaf empowerment.
Graduate Students
Demet Kayabaşı
Demet is a sixth-year Linguistics Ph.D. candidate whose research interests include (morpho)syntax, syntax-semantics interface, as well as gesture and multimodal communication.
She completed both her BA and MA in Linguistics in Turkey, at Dokuz Eylül University and Boğaziçi University, respectively. Her research there focused on syntax-semantics interface phenomena such as NPI licensing in Turkish during her BA, and argument structure alternations in Turkish Sign Language (TİD), as well as age of acquisition effects on such structures during her MA.
During her time at U of M, she has worked on reflexives in Turkish Sign Language (TİD) and emphatic anaphora in Turkish. Currently, she is working on comparing whether and/or how the encoding of noun and verb categories emerges across the gesture-language continuum as her dissertation project.
Sovoya Davis
Sovoya is a fifth-year Linguistics Ph.D. candidate. She is currently working on research that investigates multimodality in African American Languages. More specifically, exploring language-related gestures shared between Black American Sign Language and African American English. Her research primarily centers Black women.
Kendall Lowe
Kendall is a fourth-year Linguistics Ph.D. candidate. Her research examines prosodic-gestural interfaces in African American languages, including African American Vernacular English and Black American Sign Language.
Research Assistants
Rachel Lee
Aaden Anderson
Catherine Weir
Jacquelyn McClanahan
Katie Hoyer
Melissa Reimann
Alumni
Fadil Al-Husseini
Zillin Xia
Elise Moo