April - Ronnie B. Wilbur
Please join me in congratulating Ronnie B. Wilbur, professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, on her election as a 2023 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the highest national distinctions within the scientific community.
The select fellowship recognizes distinguished achievement among scientists whose work has advanced science or its applications. The AAAS cites Wilbur’s “distinguished contributions to the field of linguistics, particularly the syntax of American Sign Language.” She specializes in language and deafness and in the structure of American Sign Language (ASL) and is an authority on how sign languages compare to spoken languages.
Wilbur has investigated literacy problems of school-age deaf children and has documented deaf children’s sign language knowledge does not interfere with English acquisition. Her research has shown that the single best predictor of deaf children’s ultimate educational outcomes is their fluency in ASL. She also has investigated the interaction of ASL sentence structure with event structure and discourse/pragmatic functions, as well as nonmanual markers, such as blinks, brow raises and head nods, which she has shown perform the same function as spoken language morphemes in the syntax and semantics of sign languages.
Over the decades, she has been funded by NSF and NIH for her work on techniques for automatic sign language recognition with computer-vision faculty (Avinash Kak and Jeffrey Siskind, both professors of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, and Aleix Martínez of Amazon). She has also been funded by NSF for research on Croatian Sign Language, and by the Department of Education for research with Nicoletta Adamo, professor in computer graphics technology in Purdue Polytechnic to develop ASL software for the education of deaf children in mathematics.
Congratulations, Professor Wilbur!
David A. Reingold
Senior Vice President for Policy Planning
Justin S. Morrill Dean of Liberal Arts
Professor of Sociology