Joan Nash

Office number:	103
Office address:	621 Commonwealth Ave. Boston, MA 02215

BS, Boston University
MEd, Boston University

Publications

To appear: C. Neidle and J. Nash, Noun Phrase. In R. Pfau, M. Steinbach, and B. Woll, eds., Sign Language: An International Handbook. Walter de Gruyter.

To appear: C. Neidle, N. Michael, J. Nash, and D. Metaxas, A Method for Recognition of Grammatically Significant Head Movements and Facial Expressions, Developed Through Use of a Linguistically Annotated Video Corpus. Proceedings of the Workshop on Formal Approaches to Sign Languages, held as part of the 21st European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, Bordeaux, France, July 20-31, 2009.

Athitsos, V., Neidle, C., S Sclaroff, S., Nash, J., Stefan, A., Yuan, Q., and Thangali, A. (2008) The ASL lexicon video dataset. Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on CVPR for Human Communicative Behavior Analysis. June 2008.

Bahan, B. and Poole Nash, J. (1996) The Formation of Signing Communities: Perspective from Martha's Vineyard. In J. Mann (ed.), Deaf Studies IV Conference proceedings. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University College of Continuing Education.

Background

Having taught deaf children in Newton, MA for many years, Joan returned for doctoral study, to pursue her interest in signed languages and linguistics.

Excerpt from "A Silent Culture With a Strong Voice," Bostonia, Spring 2001

As a young girl, Joan Poole Nash was fascinated when she read about Helen Keller. She began to teach herself American Sign Language (ASL), which she practiced with several deaf children at a summer camp where she was a counselor. When Poole Nash visited her great-grandmother, Emily Howland Poole, on Martha's Vineyard, her great-grandmother told her that she too knew a few signs. "I didn't think she meant the sign language that deaf people used," Poole Nash (SED '81) says. "I thought she meant the Indian signs the Boy Scouts used."

Much later, when Poole Nash enrolled in SED, she realized that her great-grandmother, who was not deaf, had been using "an old, old sign language" that, while similar to ASL, was unique to the island. As it turned out, in nineteenth-century Martha's Vineyard -- where travel was rare and intermarriage common -- an inbred recessive gene caused a high incidence of deafness in the island's population. In her 1985 book Everyone Here Speaks Sign Language, Nora Ellen Groce estimates that in the nineteenth century one person in every 5,728 in the United States was born deaf, but on Martha's Vineyard, the ratio was one in 155. In Chilmark, where Emily Howland Poole grew up, it was one in twenty-five, and in the small neighborhood of Squibnocket, one in four. Growing up, islanders used what Poole Nash calls Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, or MVSL, as frequently as spoken English.

But by the late 1970s MVSL had almost disappeared. Emily Howland Poole, then in her nineties, was among the last of the islanders to remember it (the last deaf person to use the signs had died in the 1950s). When she recognized the value of her discovery, Poole Nash, at the time a sophomore at BU, led a team of researchers to Martha's Vineyard to record what her great-grandmother knew. "This is it," Poole Nash says of the ten hours of videotape she collected. In all, she recorded 300 signs -- the last of the once-ubiquitous language. "I wish I'd had my great-grandfather and his brother because they were very proficient signers. If we'd had them, we'd have the whole language."

She did have her grandfather, who she had assumed was too young to have known the signs. "It turned out that his friend's parents had a housekeeper who was deaf," Poole Nash says, "and he used to go over there to eat lunch on school days, so he knew quite a lot." On the black-and-white videotape, her grandfather sits facing the camera, a pipe dangling from his mouth to free his hands for forming signs: codfish, swordfish, scallop. The sign for swordfish, Poole Nash says, is "purely Martha's Vineyard," bearing little resemblance to the ASL sign. MVSL, she says, most likely preceded, or developed concurrently with, ASL.

Poole Nash has always been enchanted by the islanders' stories portraying the hearing and the deaf interacting without boundaries. If there were social boundaries, they weren't between the deaf and the hearing; when people gathered at the general store, for example, they congregated by gender. "The men would tell stories using their voices and sign language," Poole Nash says, smiling,"but the punch line was always delivered in sign language if it was risque."

Most important about her research, Poole Nash says, was that it revealed a community where the deaf and the hearing were equals. Both hearing and deaf islanders were fluent signers, and no one in Chilmark considered deaf people disabled. Poole Nash recalls her great-grandmother's response to those who referred to the deaf as handicapped. "Handicapped?" Emily Howland Poole said. "They weren't handicapped. They were just deaf."

"People in the deaf community were empowered by this," says Poole Nash, who today teaches the deaf and hard of hearing, in Newton, Massachusetts. "For me, it moved from being a historical, linguistic project to being almost a deaf community affirmation. I am still very interested in my data, but the stories became much more important -- a hope of deaf and hearing people getting along on equal terms rather than deaf people always struggling to try to be equal with hearing people."