Ursula Bellugi, a pioneer in the study of the biological foundations of language and one of the first to demonstrate that sign language was as complex, abstract and systematic as spoken language, died on Sunday (17) in San Diego (California, United States), at age 91.
His death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by his son Rob Klima.
Bellugi was a principal investigator at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego for nearly five decades, and for much of that period was director of its cognitive neuroscience laboratory. She has made significant contributions in three main areas: language development in children; the linguistic structure and neurological basis of American Sign Language; and the social behavior and language skills of people with a rare genetic disorder, Williams syndrome.
“She leaves an indelible legacy in shedding light on how humans communicate and socialize with one another,” Rusty Gage, president of the Salk Institute, said in a statement.
Bellugi’s work, largely done in collaboration with her husband, Edward S. Klima, advanced our understanding of the brain and the origins of language, both signed and spoken.
American Sign Language was first described as a true language in 1960 by William C. Stokoe Jr., a professor at Gallaudet University, the only humanities university in the world dedicated to the deaf. But he was mocked and attacked for this position.
Bellugi and Edward Klima, who died in 2008, demonstrated conclusively that the world’s sign languages ​​— of which there are more than a hundred — were real languages ​​in their own right, not just translations of spoken languages.
Bellugi, who focused on American Sign Language, established that these language systems were transmitted, in all their complexity, from one generation of deaf people to the next. For this reason, the scientific community considers her the founder of the neurobiology of American Sign Language.
The couple’s work led to a major discovery at the Salk lab: that the left hemisphere of the brain has an innate predisposition to language, whether spoken or gestural. This discovery gave scientists new insight into how the brain learns, interprets and forgets language.
“It was a critical discovery for the deaf, as it verified that our language is treated equally by the brain – just as we should be treated equally by society,” said Roberta J. Cordano, president of Gallaudet, in a statement.
Until then, sign languages ​​were viewed disparagingly as crude pantomime, without rules, or as uneducated English, and deaf children were discouraged from learning to gesticulate. The couple’s work contributed to a wider acceptance of LAS as a language of learning and helped to empower the deaf as the Deaf Pride movement evolved in the 1980s.
Another subject Bellugi and her husband studied was Williams syndrome. She sought to understand how this disorder, in which a set of about 20 genes is missing from one copy of a chromosome, changed the brain and, consequently, behavior.
His body of work, the Salk Institute said in a profile of Bellugi, “helped paint a picture of the biology that humans use to interact with the world around us.”
Ursula Herzberger was born on February 21, 1931, in Jena, Germany, a center of science and technology. With Hitler on the rise, her family fled Germany in 1934 and eventually settled in Rochester, New York. There, her father Max Herzberger, a mathematician and physicist, became head of Eastman Kodak’s optical research laboratories, a job arranged for him by Albert Einstein, her friend and former professor in Berlin.
Herzberger developed a special lens that resolved color distortion in the glass. Ursula’s mother, Edith (Kaufmann) Herzberger, was an artist.
Ursula attended Antioch College in Ohio, where she majored in psychology in 1952. She married Italian composer and conductor Piero Bellugi in 1953; they had two children before they divorced in 1959.
Interested in psychology and language, Ursula moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she became a research assistant to Roger Brown, an eminent psychologist at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studied how young children acquire language. Soon she was studying at Harvard, where she earned a doctorate in education in 1967 while raising her children. She also took courses at MIT, where one of her professors was Klima.
When they were married, she legally changed her name to Bellugi-Klima, but continued to use Bellugi professionally. They moved to the western United States when he began teaching at the University of California, San Diego. She started in 1968 at the Salk Institute, a ten-minute walk from her husband’s campus, where she also taught. Later, she taught at San Diego State University.
At the time, San Diego was a hub for linguistic research, revolving primarily around Bellugi and Klima, as well as colleagues hailing from Harvard and MIT. She attracted a number of research assistants and made a point of hiring many deaf people.
Over the years, Bellugi has received numerous awards. She was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2007. She retired from Salk in 2017 at age 86.
She has co-authored hundreds of articles and several books, some of them with her husband. Her best-known book was “The Signs of Language” (1979), written with ten associates. It was the first comprehensive study of the grammar and psychology of sign languages, and was hailed by the Association of American Publishers as the “most important book of the year in the behavioral sciences”.
In addition to her son Rob, Bellugi is survived by a sister, Ruth Rosenberg; a brother, Hans Herzberger; four grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Another son, David Bellugi, died in 2017.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
