Department
Linguistics

Office Location
Sorenson Language and Communication Center (SLCC)  3217

Email Address
deborah.pichler@gallaudet.edu

Debbie Chen Pichler grew up in a bilingual environment, traveling frequently between the US and Taiwan. She began her first, informal studies of comparative syntax when, at the age of 12, she was hired by her local Taiwanese American Association to teach spoken Taiwanese to middle-school students. Faced with the fact that she didn't know any way to write Taiwanese (there is no standardized written form), Debbie set out to elucidate the rules of Taiwanese syntax on her own. Sadly, she never progressed very far in this task, but the experience whetted her appetite for linguistics, even if she remained unaware at the time that this was the name of the field she wanted to enter. In college, she declared biology as her major, but found herself compulsively signing up for elective classes in French, German, Italian, Chinese and American Sign Language as "diversions". Realizing at last that her interest in the structure of language far outstripped her interest (and abilities) in biology, she entered graduate school in the field of linguistics.

A member of the Gallaudet Linguistics faculty since 2002, Debbie has taught courses on first and second language acquisition, comparative studies (of ASL vs. English, or ASL vs. other signed systems) and generative syntax. Her research interests focus on the acquisition of ASL by deaf children and hearing bilinguals (coda children), as well as the acquisition of ASL as a second language. She is also involved in research on the syntax of Croatian Sign Language, continuing her original interest in investigating the grammar of previously understudied languages .

L1 acquisition of ASL by deaf children; bilingual acquisition of English and ASL by hearing children of deaf parents (codas); L2 acquisition of ASL; cross-linguistic study of sign language syntax