About

Richard P. Meier is a Professor and Dean's Advisor on Language and Area Studies Programs at the University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts. His research focuses on the linguistics of signed languages, including American Sign Language, and the processes involved in first language acquisition. His work contributes to understanding the structure and development of signed languages, supporting linguistic and educational advancements in this field.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Natural Language Processing
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology
• History
• Cognitive science
• Audiology
• Mathematical analysis
• Developmental psychology
• Medicine
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• New insights into nineteenth-century ASL

  Diachronica · 2026-02-20

  articleSenior author

  Abstract The study of language change in American Sign Language (ASL) has been constrained by a limited historical record. Here we present five case studies that demonstrate how applying a broad set of historical methods, together with the consultation of underutilized sources of sign data, can shed new light on ASL in the 19th century. These case studies cover aspects of two subsystems of ASL, (i) the fingerspelling alphabet and (ii) the numeral system, as well as (iii) the etymologies of selected initialized signs, (iv) the innovation of superordinate terms, and (v) phonological variation in the mano cornuta , or horns, handshape. We argue that these case studies reveal two broad drivers of change in the history of ASL. Bottom-up changes, often driven by biomechanical or perceptual factors, originated within the ASL signing community, likely without signers’ conscious awareness. Top-down, or prescriptive, changes were effective in the early years of ASL, when the signing community was small and still tightly linked to schools for the deaf where these changes were instituted and where they first spread.

  PublisherDOI

• Diachrony and Diachronica

  Diachronica · 2025-05-23 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Author Response: The Structure and Geography of the ASL Signing Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Hartford Gatherings of 1850 and 1854

  2025-06-03

  peer-reviewOpen accessSenior author

  In the early decades of the 19th century, the deaf population in the eastern US and Canada was distributed across a vast area. After the 1817 founding of the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, CT and the subsequent establishment of schools for the deaf in New York City (NYSD), Philadelphia, and many other US states, hundreds of deaf students called these schools home for several years. After leaving school, the early American Deaf community faced a challenge: How would the community maintain its social and linguistic ties across a vast geographical area once community members had dispersed to their hometowns? In this paper we analyze the attendance registries of two large gatherings of deaf individuals in Hartford in the years 1850 and 1854. These were among the largest and earliest known gatherings of deaf adults. The demographic data included in these registries open a window onto the evolving American Deaf community of the mid-19th century. Our analyses of the attendees’ school affiliations, ages, and marital status show that the signing community that had taken root among students at schools in Hartford and New York persisted among the adult graduates of those schools in towns across the northeastern US. We compare the places of residence of ASD and NYSD alumni in 1850 and 1854 to their hometowns when they first enrolled at school. Our comparisons suggest the mid-19th-century signing community had become more urban; it was centered to a greater extent in populous cities such as New York, Boston, and Hartford than had been true when the attendees had enrolled in school. We consider how the geography of deafness in the 19th century might inform our understanding of the sources of regional variation in ASL. We also consider how early cross-regional interactions may have inhibited such regional variation.

  PublisherDOI

• The Structure and Geography of the ASL Signing Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Hartford Gatherings of 1850 and 1854

  Cadernos de Linguística · 2025-08-07 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In the early decades of the 19th century, the deaf population in the eastern US and Canada was distributed across a vast area. After the 1817 founding of the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, CT and the subsequent establishment of schools for the deaf in New York City (NYSD), Philadelphia, and many other US states, hundreds of deaf students called these schools home for several years. After leaving school, the early American Deaf community faced a challenge: How would the community maintain its social and linguistic ties across a vast geographical area once community members had dispersed to their hometowns? In this paper we analyze the attendance registries of two large gatherings of deaf individuals in Hartford in the years 1850 and 1854. These were among the largest and earliest known gatherings of deaf adults. The demographic data included in these registries open a window onto the evolving American Deaf community of the mid-19th century. Our analyses of the attendees’ school affiliations, ages, and marital status show that the signing community that had taken root among students at schools in Hartford and New York persisted among the adult graduates of those schools in towns across the northeastern US. We compare the places of residence of ASD and NYSD alumni in 1850 and 1854 to their hometowns when they first enrolled at school. Our comparisons suggest the mid-19th-century signing community had become more urban; it was centered to a greater extent in populous cities such as New York, Boston, and Hartford than had been true when the attendees had enrolled in school. We consider how the geography of deafness in the 19th century might inform our understanding of the sources of regional variation in ASL. We also consider how early cross-regional interactions may have inhibited such regional variation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Structure and Place of the ASL Signing Community in the Mid-nineteenth Century: The Hartford Gatherings of 1850 and 1854

  Preprints.org · 2024-05-06 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  In the early decades of the 19th century, the deaf population in the eastern US and Canada was distributed across a vast area. After the 1817 founding of the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, CT and the subsequent establishment of schools for the deaf in New York City (NYSD), Philadelphia, and many other US states, hundreds of deaf students called these schools home for several years. After leaving school, the early American Deaf community faced a challenge: How would the community maintain its social and linguistic ties across a vast geographical area once community members had dispersed to their hometowns? In this paper we analyze the attendance registries of two large gatherings of deaf individuals in Hartford in the years 1850 and 1854. These were among the largest and earliest known gatherings of deaf adults. The demographic data included in these registries open a window onto the evolving American Deaf community of the mid-19th century. Our analyses of the attendees’ school affiliations, ages, and marital status show that the signing community that had taken root among students at schools in Hartford and New York persisted among the adult graduates of those schools in towns across the northeastern US. We compare the places of residence of ASD and NYSD alumni in 1850 and 1854 to their hometowns when they first enrolled at school. Our comparisons suggest the mid-19th-century signing community had become more urban; it was centered to a greater extent in populous cities such as New York, Boston, and Hartford than had been true when the attendees had enrolled in school. We consider how the geography of deafness in the 19th century might inform our understanding of the sources of regional variation in ASL. We also consider how early cross-regional interactions may have inhibited such regional variation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The historical demography of the Martha’s Vineyard signing community

  The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education · 2024-01-29 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The deaf population of Martha's Vineyard has fascinated scholars for more than a century since Alexander Graham Bell's research on the frequent occurrence of deafness there and since Groce's book on the island's signing community (Groce, N. E. (1985). Everyone here spoke sign language: Hereditary deafness on Martha's Vineyard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.). In Groce's work, and in that of subsequent scholars, the Vineyard signing community has often been portrayed as remote and outlying, having developed independently of mainland signing communities for roughly 133 years until 1825. We re-examine that interpretation in light of historical, demographic, and genealogical evidence covering the period 1692-2008. We argue that the Vineyard signing community began in Chilmark in 1785, 93 years later than previously thought, and that it had had a brief period of independent development, roughly 40 years, before becoming well connected, through deaf education, to the nascent New England signing community. We consider the implications of the Vineyard community's history for our understanding of how village signing communities develop.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Demographics in the Formation of Language Communities and in the Emergence of Languages: The Early Years of Asl in New England

  Language · 2023-06-01 · 16 citations

  articleSenior author

  How may the structure of a new linguistic community shape language emergence and change? The 1817 founding of the US's first enduring school for the deaf, the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, heralded profound changes in the lives of deaf North Americans. We report the demographics of the early signing community at ASD through quantitative analyses of the 1,700 students who attended the school during its first fifty years. The majority were adolescents, with adults also well represented. Prior to 1845, children under age eight were absent. We consider two groups of students who may have made important linguistic contributions to this early signing community: students with deaf relatives and students from Martha's Vineyard. We conclude that adolescents played a crucial role in forming the New England signing community. Young children may have pushed the emergence of ASL, but likely did so at home in deaf families, not at ASD.

  PublisherDOI

• Editorial: Modality and language acquisition: how does the channel through which language is expressed affect how children and adults are able to learn?

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2023-12-04 · 1 citations

  editorialOpen access1st author

  EDITORIAL article Front. Psychol., 04 December 2023Sec. Psychology of Language Volume 14 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1334171

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A case study of the American Sign Language patterns of a natively-exposed Deaf autistic signer

  Language Acquisition · 2023-12-19 · 3 citations

  article

  Research on the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf autistic children has documented similarities to the linguistic profile of hearing children on the autism spectrum and has identified sign-specific phenomena that could serve as clinical markers of autism in the deaf population. However, the acquisition of a signed language by deaf autistic individuals whose language use appears to be at age-level is not well documented. Here we present a case study of ASL use by a Deaf autistic adolescent exposed to ASL since birth. Data include two video recordings (collected at age 16;11 and 17;4 years) of his spontaneous ASL. Utterances were coded for repetitions, phonological form, fingerspelling, metalinguistic awareness, and facial expressions having grammatical functions. Other data include a writing sample (17;6) and background information obtained from parental interviews and formal psycho-educational evaluations (between ages 14 and 17). Results revealed this adolescent has strong ASL skills including sophisticated vocabulary and semantic content, advanced fingerspelling, and evidence of metalinguistic awareness. His distinctive signing patterns include abundant repetition of phrases, intrusion of non-ASL handshapes, articulation disfluency, reduced facial expressiveness, and a dissociation between fingerspelling and writing skills. The results of this study diversify and broaden discussions of the ways that autism may interact with language development, especially in the visual-gestural modality. Understanding language patterns in autistic signers more fully will improve identification of autism in the deaf population, promote acceptance of diverse signing patterns in the Deaf community, and lead to better support for this population.

  PublisherDOI

• A Rare Presentation of Tuberculosis-Related Septic Shock

  Cureus · 2022-12-14 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Septic shock with multi-organ dysfunction is an exceedingly rare, but known complication of untreated Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) infection. TB-associated cases of septic shock are predominantly reported in immunocompromised patients; however, it can manifest in a healthy individual if the infection is not treated. Through the interaction of lipoarabinomannan (LAM) on the mycobacterium cell wall with antigen-presenting cells, the bacteria may be able to survive in host cells for long periods of time. Without prompt treatment, TB may cause bronchiectasis and multi-organ failure. We report a case of a 24-year-old woman with untreated TB who developed widespread bronchiectasis and septic shock.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sign Language in Deaf and Hearing Autistic Children

  NSF · $12k · 2008–2010

• NIH Grant R01DC001691

  NIH · $582k · 1998

Frequent coauthors

• Diane Lillo‐Martin

  9 shared

• Aaron Shield

  Miami University

  8 shared

• Kearsy Cormier

  University College London

  7 shared

• David Quinto‐Pozos

  The University of Texas at Austin

  5 shared

• Elissa L. Newport

  Georgetown University

  5 shared

• David Smith

  4 shared

• Louis Costanzo

  SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University

  4 shared

• Chetana Pendkar

  State University of New York

  4 shared