Ursula Bellugi: Groundbreaking language scientist (1931–2022)

Ursula Bellugi, a pioneer in the study of language, cognition, and the brain, died peacefully at the age of 91 in La Jolla, California, on April 17, 2022. Ursula (“Ursie”) Bellugi was instrumental in demonstrating that American Sign Language (ASL) is not just an ad hoc collection of hand gestures but has complex linguistic structure (different from English) and is processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, as are spoken languages. In addition, Bellugi’s pioneering investigation of children with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, revealed unusual patterns of spared linguistic and social abilities in the face of impaired cognition, which helped to clarify the neural systems that mediate language and cognitive functions. Ursie had an impact not only on our understanding of human language but also on the communities she worked with: the Deaf community and families with William syndrome. She was given a name sign by deaf colleagues (a U handshape tapping the side of the chin), and she was fondly known as “Dr. B” by members of the William Syndrome Association.

Bellugi (née Herzberger) was born in Jena, Germany, and when she was a small child, her family immigrated to Rochester, New York to escape Nazi persecution. She attended Antioch College (graduating in 1952), where she met her first husband, Piero Bellugi, an Italian conductor and composer. Ursie received her doctorate in Education from Harvard University in 1967, where she studied under Roger Brown, the famed psychologist who documented the language development of three children (now also famous): Adam, Eve, and Sarah. Ursie’s dissertation, “The acquisition of the system of negation in children's speech” (1), was based on data from these children, and this work is still cited today. Ursie completed her doctorate as a single mother, riding her bike to campus with her two young sons, David and Robin, in tow. Her marriage to Piero Bellugi had ended in 1959. While taking courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she met Edward Klima, who was her linguistics professor and who went on to become her scientific and life partner, adopting her two children (Ed died in 2008). In 1968, Ursie followed Ed to La Jolla, where he became faculty in Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego, and she took up a research position at the nearby Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

In 1970, Ursie established the Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Science (later renamed the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience). Given the focus of the Salk Institute on biology and her background in child language acquisition, she sought out a new and innovative research question, inspired by Eric Lenneberg’s ideas about the biological foundations of language (2): How do deaf children learn sign language, a language that uses the hands instead of the vocal tract and is perceived by the eyes rather than by the ears? She had no idea where to start. She has told the story of simply looking up “deaf” in the yellow pages and finding a club for mothers with deaf children. Ursie and Ed quickly discovered that they needed to first document what deaf children were learning: Did ASL have linguistic structure? If so, how to describe it? At the time, even some deaf people were resistant to thinking of ASL as a separate, real language, saying things like “Don’t show them that—that’s slang!” and “Signing is English plus mime.”

During these early years, Ursie and Ed produced many of the foundational results on sign language structure, acquisition, and processing, in addition to training almost everyone who subsequently entered the field of sign language linguistics (which was not even a term in the 1970s). Some of the critical discoveries that emerged from this research were the following: iconicity (the resemblance between a form and its meaning) is often submerged by historical, grammatical, and processing pressures; mime differs systematically from sign; signers make “slips of the hand,” which reveal the phonological (form-based) units that make up signs; sign languages differ from one another in their phonological structure; changes in movement express grammatical contrasts; poetry and song exist in a language without sound. In 1979, these findings were presented in The Signs of Language (3), coauthored with 10 members of their team (Robbin Battison, Penny Boyes-Braem, Susan Fischer, Nancy Frishberg, Harlan Lane, Ella Mae Lentz, Don Newkirk, Elissa Newport, Carlene Canady Pedersen, and Patricia Siple). The Signs of Language was reviewed in the journal Science by Jean Berko Gleason (4) and received the Most Outstanding Book in the Behavioral Sciences Award from the Association of American Publishers.

In 1987, Ursie published another foundational book, What the Hands Reveal About the Brain (5), coauthored with Howard Poizner and Ed Klima, which was also reviewed in Science (by Paula Menyuk) (6). In this book, Bellugi and colleagues summarized their studies showing that left hemisphere damage causes sign language aphasias, parallel to spoken language aphasias, but right hemisphere damage does not, despite the visual–spatial nature of sign language. This key discovery revealed that what is critical to the control of language by the left hemisphere is linguistic structure, not auditory processing or vocal articulation. Bellugi and her colleagues continued to study the similarities and differences in how the brain processes spoken and signed languages using positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and electrophysiological methods. These studies revealed similar within-hemisphere neural organization for signed and spoken languages, but some sign language functions engaged the right hemisphere as well (particularly the use of spatial classifier constructions).

Sometime in the early 1980s, Ursie got a call from a parent of a child with Williams syndrome, who had been referred to her by Noam Chomsky (who was a good friend of Ursie’s). Bellugi recognized immediately that this child had a very unusual profile, exhibiting an apparent dissociation between linguistic abilities (relatively intact) and cognitive abilities (markedly impaired). Ursie was also charmed by this encounter, and she used the pseudonym “Crystal” in publications because she provided a “crystal ball” for exploring the relationship between language and cognition, and subsequently for seeing how to link gene, behavior, and the brain. Bellugi and her colleagues went on to discover that musical rhythm processing was relatively spared in individuals with Williams syndrome, supporting the idea that musical ability constitutes an independent intelligence. This line of research began after Bellugi met Howard Lenhoff, a neurobiologist whose daughter was an opera singer with Williams syndrome. Bellugi also recruited Daniel Levitin (best-selling author, but then a young doctoral student studying music cognition) to accompany her to the Berkshires, where a music camp was held for children with Williams syndrome. Bellugi had an enthusiasm for new ideas and a personal magnetism that drew outstanding scientists to work with her. She collaborated with Albert Galaburda and Allan Reiss to uncover the neuroanatomy of Williams syndrome, with Julie Korenberg to investigate its genetic basis, and with Ralph Adolphs to understand the hypersociability of people with Williams syndrome; many of their findings are presented in the book Journey from Cognition to Brain to Gene (7). Ursie also wanted the scientists that she worked with to get to know people with Williams syndrome personally, and she insisted that they attend the family gatherings that she often hosted at the Salk Institute.

Throughout her career, Bellugi collaborated with many, many students and researchers (deaf and hearing) from distinct disciplines, published hundreds of highly cited articles, and received many awards, including the IPSEN prize for neural plasticity, an NIH Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, and two consecutive NIH MERIT awards. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. She also received an honorary doctorate from Gallaudet University.

After nearly 50 years at the Salk Institute, Ursula Bellugi retired in 2018 at the age of 87. Ursie will be remembered for her remarkable contributions to science, for her support of the Deaf community and people with Williams syndrome, for inspiring students and colleagues to ask challenging questions, and perhaps also fondly for her wardrobe: beautiful muumuus and a large shell necklace.