Carol Padden
The multimodal potential of human languages
Sunday, September 14, 2025, 9:00 – 10:00 am, Elstad Auditorium
Speaker: Carol Padden, PhD., University of California, San Diego
The body of work on spoken language, gesture and sign language are starting to converge around understanding multimodality in language. A large part of what has driven this research in multimodality is a richer description of the diversity of sign languages around the world. Sign languages range from the very large, such as national sign languages that are used in different parts of the world such as American Sign Language but also sign languages in populous areas like India and throughout Africa. Sign languages can also be small or very small, such as those that have recently emerged in villages and families. Often described as “deaf sign languages”, the focus has been on how deafness drives the use and emergence of languages that rely on the visual modality. Less recognized is the role of hearing signers in sign language emergence and persistence. As members of the same communities where sign languages are used, their participation sustains language learning and use across generations of signers. Hearing speakers can and do use sign language, adding to the broad repertoire of expressive possibilities in human languages. This talk will discuss cases of sign language emergence around the world, ranging from families to villages and regions, which, taken together, demonstrate the inherently multimodal flexibility of human language.
About Carol Padden
Carol Padden joined the faculty at University of California, San Diego in the Department of Communication in 1983, after earning a Ph.D. from the university’s Department of Linguistics. She holds the Sanford I. Berman Chair in Language and Human Communication and has served as associate dean and faculty equity advisor in the School of Social Sciences from 2008 to 2013. In 2014, she became the Dean and leads a dynamic and highly ranked School spanning 11 academic departments and 5 interdisciplinary programs. Padden’s areas of research include language emergence and sign language structure. With her husband, Professor Tom Humphries, she is a co-author of 2 textbooks on American Sign Language and 2 books on deaf communities in the US. She is a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. In 2010, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.