Dorothy Casterline was an American researcher, writer and poet. It took decades for her contributions to deaf culture to be ______. In 1965, the deaf linguist worked with two others to ______ the first dictionary of American Sign Language. Their Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles ______ ASL as a distinct language with its own syntax (句法), and organized signs by hand movement rather than ______ order. The book was met with ______ among linguists, who saw ASL as ______ a gestural branch of English, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that Casterline was ______ with helping create deaf cultural identity. “We were ______ think of ASL as a picture language,” she said. ”Seeing these ________ symbols for the first time can be discouraging.“

Born in Honolulu to Japanese-American parents, Casterline lost her hearing in her teens ______ illness. She studied English at Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf, and graduated with honors in 1958. She then joined the school’s English faculty the first person of color on ______ and became a researcher at the linguistics lab, transcribing thousands of hours of interviews to compile the ASL dictionary. The work became a ______, and she toiled “late into the night and on weekends, sometimes with her newborn son in one arm,” said The New York Times.

After the book was done, Casterline left academia to raise her children. Last year, Gallaudet awarded her an honorary doctorate in recognition of work that ______ “a renaissance in the history of the deaf community,” said Gallaudet.edu. She remained ______ of the book, saying she wrote it “to show that deaf people can be studied as linguistic and cultural communities, and not only as ______.”