Although the origins of sign language for deaf or hearing-impaired people date back hundreds of years, its use has been highly stigmatized as being a lesser way of communicating. Neuroscientist Ursula Bellugi made significant contributions to decreasing the stigma of American Sign Language (ASL) by showing it is a complex language and not a truncated stand-in for spoken language, as some critics had described it. Bellugi died on April 17 at the age of 91.
Bellugi was born in Jena, Germany, on February 21, 1931, as Ursula Herzberger. Her father, Max, was a prominent mathematician, and her mother, Edith, was an artist. In response to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the dwindling prospects for Max as a Jewish scholar, the family left Germany in 1934 for upstate New York. According to The New York Times, her father’s friend and former professor, Albert Einstein, helped him get settled in Rochester ...
