Ursula Bellugi

Advertising and content can be personalised based on your profile. Your activity on this service can be used to build or improve a profile about you for personalised advertising and content. Advertising and content performance can be measured. Reports can be generated based on your activity and those of others. Your activity on this service can help develop and improve products and services. While working at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., the late cognitive neuroscientist Ursula Bellugi discovered that, much like spoken language, sign language was made up of specific building blocks whose assembly followed strict rules. Her subsequent discoveries about the complexities of sign language led to both linguistic breakthroughs and changes in the way deaf people felt about signing. Bellugi demonstrated that sign language is as rich and complex as any spoken language. Her work deepened our understanding of what it means to communicate as humans. [New to this season of Lost Women of Science? Listen to the most recent episodes on the "Black Angels," Ruby Payne-Scott, Sallie Pero Mead, Vera Peters, Annie Montague Alexander, Emma Unson Rotor, and Mária Telkes.] Lost Women of Science is produced for the ear. Where possible, we recommend listening to the audio for the most accurate representation of what was said. Katie Hafner: I’m Katie Hafner, and this is Lost Women of Science: From Our Inbox, a series of mini-episodes featuring women in science who came to us from you, our listeners. On today’s episode, we hear from Nancy Frishberg about Ursula Bellugi, a cognitive scientist who worked on understanding how language is rooted in our brains. Producer Samia Bouzid brings us her story. Samia Bouzid: Meanwhile, in the 1960s and ’70s, a small collection of scientists grew interested in something that many people didn’t consider language at all: signing. But that was all about to change, in large part thanks to the cognitive scientist, Ursula Bellugi. Nancy Frishberg: She and her lab were able to say with confidence that sign languages are real languages. Samia Bouzid: And in doing so, she not only changed the thinking around sign language. She let us in on some of the inner workings of the human mind. Ursula Bellugi was born Ursula Herzberger in Jena, Germany, in 1931. Three years later, her family fled the Nazis and found refuge in Rochester, New York. Ursula grew up in an intellectual environment. Her dad was a physicist and a mathematician– a friend of Albert Einstein's– and her mom was an artist. In 1952, Ursula graduated with a degree in psychology from Antioch University, in Ohio. The following year, like so many women of that era, she got married — to the Italian conductor Piero Bellugi — and had two boys. But the marriage didn’t last long, and by 1959, Ursula was a single parent, raising two young children. And that could have been the end of it– a life swallowed up by Little League, chicken pox, and multiplication tables. But that’s not who Ursula Bellugi was. While she was there, she worked on understanding how young children learn their first language. Basically, how they go from spitting out single words to crafting simple phrases and sentences. Along the way, she met a linguist named Edward Klima. He became her partner in science, and before long, also her partner in life. In 1968, doctorate in hand, Ursula moved across the country with her family and took a job at the Salk Institute in California. And Ursula had questions. Through her work at Harvard, she had become fixated on the question of how we learn language. And since then, she’d grown especially interested in sign language. She thought that studying a language that's so different from spoken language could help clarify what about language is fundamental to us as humans . Her idea was basically: Peel back all the layers that are tied to the specific ways language is made, and see what's left. And with any luck, pinpointing the