ASL researcher Dorothy Chiyoko Sueoka Casterline dies at 95
Gallaudet University announced in an article that noted ASL researcher Dorothy Chiyoko Sueoka Casterline, who was deaf, passed away on August 8. She was 95.
The writer of the article, Robert Weinstock, explained that Casterline, along with the late Carl Croneberg, “conducted much of the painstaking field research that led to the formal recognition of American Sign Language in the late 1950s and early 1960s.”
Casterline was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and became deaf when she was 14. She attended the Diamond Head School for the Deaf and Blind and was educated orally. The school is now known as the Hawaii School for the Deaf and Blind.
Weinstock said up until the early 1950s, deaf people were not allowed to drive in Hawaii, but with the involvement of the NAD, Casterline, while she was still a teenager, helped convince the Honolulu police department to allow deaf people to drive.
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The article said when Casterline was a senior at Gallaudet College in the 1950s, famed linguist William Stokoe “recruited her to collaborate with him in the first scientific study of deaf people using sign language. Stokoe valued her sharp eye for detail, which made her indispensable in transcribing signs.”
The article said the research led to the “universal recognition that sign languages are true, natural, structured languages, not merely gestures, as most linguists believed…”
Casterline later taught English at Gallaudet and was a co-writer of the 1965 publication, “A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles” along with Stokoe and Croneberg.
During Gallaudet’s commencement in May 2022, Casterline received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.
https://gallaudet.edu/university-communications/dorothy-chiyoko-sueoka-casterline-an-appreciation/