Acknowledgments

Creating this video textbook was a major undertaking that was only possible thanks to the invaluable contributions of many people.

First, I’d like to thank all the Gallaudet students who ever took my LIN510 course (Introduction to First and Second Language Acquisition), which served as the foundation for this textbook. Your enthusiastic feedback and helpful suggestions shaped the course significantly over the years, and therefore shaped this textbook as well. Deep thanks also to all the signing children and adults who participated in the research my co-authors and I conducted over the years; you offered us an invaluable window into the wonders of sign language development.

In the preface of this textbook, my co-authors and I acknowledge our funding sources and the extraordinary services of the video studio team at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC). Additionally, we would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to the following people for their contributions:

  • Ivey Wallace and Angela Leppig at Gallaudet University Press for taking on a project as adventurous and without precedent as this one;
  • Carla Morris for editing the slide text;
  • Laura Levesque for locating video footage for our example clips;
  • Lidiane Strapassola and Laura Viola Kozak for drawings and illustrations used in the slides;
  • Lucas Jesus for the graphic of hands that appears on the opening menu;
  • Dan Veltri for the voice-over;
  • Patrick Harris and, especially, Suzanne A. Scheuermann for the technical magic of converting our video content into a digital textbook.

And finally, thank you to my family, who went many, many weeks without seeing much of me while I was working on this project. It’s done now, and I promise to wait a good long time before I start a new one.

– Deborah Chen Pichler