Marking International Week of Deaf People

This year’s theme ‘No Human Rights Without Sign Language Rights’ is a powerful reminder of the importance of sign languages as full and rich linguistic systems, and the right of Deaf people to use, learn, and be educated in their natural language.

At the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, we’re proud to contribute to this mission through research into sign languages and the broader field of multimodal communication, led by the Multimodal Language Department (MLD).

What we study at the Multimodal Language Department

Our work at MLD focuses on several key questions:

• How do people coordinate different bodily articulators - like hands, facial expression, and eye gaze - to build structure and meaning in sign languages?
• How do gesture and speech work together in spoken languages across cultures?
• What can the study of iconicity - the resemblance between form and meaning - tell us about how all languages work?
• How do children, including Deaf children, learn multimodal language?
• How do differences in sensory experience (e.g. deafness, blindness), age, or neurodivergence affect how people communicate?

Our department uses a combination of methods including corpus analysis, experiments, machine learning, motion capture and virtual reality to study language as it naturally occurs in communication.

Spotlight on Sign Language research

MLD does a lot of research on different sign languages, and we’d like to highlight a few recent publications:

• Book chapter: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192886491.013.11
• Journal article: Advancing the multimodal language acquisition framework through collaborative dialogue | Max Planck Institute.
• Journal Article: Sign Language & Linguistics paper: DOI link.
• One upcoming publication by MLD researcher Anita Slominska dives into this phenomenon (Slonimska, A. (in press). Iconicity in simultaneous constructions in sign languages. In The Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language).
  Abstract: Simultaneous constructions in sign languages use multiple body articulators (hands, facial expressions, eye gaze, torso) to convey overlapping elements of meaning. These iconic constructions mirror how we perceive the world - holistically and all at once - highlighting the visual-spatial richness of sign languages and their unique grammatical structures.

Other recent and ongoing work from the department also explores how children acquire sign languages, how gesture and sign overlap, and how to model multimodal communication using computational tools.

Looking ahead

At the Max Planck Institute, sign language research is not a one-week focus - it’s an ongoing commitment. The Multimodal Language Department will continue to explore the structures and uses of sign languages, collaborate with Deaf communities, and contribute to a future where linguistic diversity is fully respected.