Rate My Professor Naomi Caselli

Naomi Caselli is an associate professor of Deaf education at Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. She is the director of the BU Deaf Center and the director of the BU AI & Education Initiative. Hearing, with American Sign Language (ASL) and English as her first languages, Caselli leads a research team that integrates sign languages into language research across education, computer science, linguistics, psychology, and medicine to ensure deaf children gain early access to language. Her scholarship centers on three key questions: How does early language experience shape language development in deaf children? How is the sign language lexicon structured, learned, and processed? How can artificial intelligence be responsibly deployed to improve accessibility for sign language users?

Caselli received her PhD in Psychology and Cognitive Science from Tufts University, MA in Psychology from Boston University, EdM in Deaf Education from Boston University, and BA in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College. As principal investigator, she has obtained major grants including NIH 1R01 DC018279 (2020-2026) on the effects of input quality on ASL vocabulary acquisition in deaf children, NSF BCS-1918252 (2019-2022) for collaborative research quantifying systematicity, iconicity, and arbitrariness in the American Sign Language lexicon, NSF BCS-1749384 (2018-2021) on articulatory and perceptual constraints in natural language evolution, NSF BCS-1625793 (2016-2020) on the ASL-LEX database, and NIH R21 Early Career Research Award DC016104 (2017-2021). Her key publications encompass "ASL-LEX: A Lexical Database for American Sign Language" (2016, Behavior Research Methods), "The road to language learning is not entirely iconic: Neighborhood density, iconicity, and frequency facilitate sign language acquisition" (2017, Psychological Science), "Degree and not type of iconicity affects sign language vocabulary acquisition" (2019, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition), "Deaf children of hearing parents develop age-level vocabularies if exposed to ASL by six-months" (2021, Journal of Pediatrics), "The signed mental lexicon: Effects of phonological neighborhood density, iconicity, and childhood language experience" (2021, Journal of Memory and Language), "ASL-CDI 2.0: An updated, normed adaptation of the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory for American Sign Language" (2020, Behavior Research Methods), and "Perceptual-semantic features of words differentially shape early vocabulary in American Sign Language and English" (2025, Applied Psycholinguistics). Caselli's contributions have significantly influenced deaf education, sign language linguistics, and AI accessibility, with her work cited over 2,900 times.