Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page She was an utterly charming, delightful, brilliant person. A joy to work with, to be around, to look at, to see inaction. 46
Stokoe's friends remember that when Judy Williams was killed in 1975 by a drunk driver, he reacted as if he had lost a daughter.
In away he had. Stokoe was almost sixtyat least twice the age of anyone else in the lab. He did feel a fatherly pride in his researchers as he watched them build on his ideas to expand the body of knowledge of ASLthe subject that had consumed most of his energies for the past twenty years.
Stokoe's discoveries influenced linguists and anthropologists not directly involved in deaf education Adam Kendon, who studied Australian aboriginal sign language Beatrice and Allen Gardner, who did gesture-language-related research with chimpanzees Gordon Hewes, who investigated the ultimate origins of human language Edward Hall, who studied nonverbal communication. Stokoe met or communicated with these and other linguists regularly, earning even greater recognition as a result.
But Bill Stokoe's primary focus never shifted. He felt that his linguistic discoveries would be useless unless they were applied to the improvement of deaf education. In his speeches and writings, and in his pronouncements at Gallaudet, Stokoe insisted that deaf students were being shortchanged as long as educators and administrators continued to ignore the research he had initiated.
In 1975, when Gallaudet began to direct funding into Cued Speech (a recently devised system by which deaf people were provided with manual cues to differentiate sounds that look the same on the lips, Stokoe wrote an essay in protest.
An observer outside the field of special education for the deaf might reasonably suppose that here at Gallaudet, if anywhere, sign language and research into its nature would flourish. However, the resolution adopted in Milan in 1880 by the International Congress of Educators of the Deaf has been questioned by some but never rejected by the established programs for the deaf inmost countries . . . Research problems multiply when unsupported claims are preferred to scientific knowledge, but institutions for the deaf

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