About Rachel Miles
About Rachel Miles
I am deeply committed to research that will encourage language access for all deaf children. My research interests have led me to three lines of research. First, I am involved in work in Vanuatu which includes documentation of both adult homesigners and deaf children in Port Vila who are being educated at a single school. Secondly, l investigate the effects of language deprivation on eventual language outcomes and communication strategies for late first language learners of ASL. Finally, I am interested in cross linguistic comparison of sign languages from deaf communities in a variety of locations and situations.
I received by BA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2003 with a double major in Spanish and International Studies. After completing two years of teaching special education through Teach for America, an Americorps program, I continued in the field of education for an additional six years and, in 2007, received my MA in Teaching, Special Education from Webster University. Over my six years of teaching, I taught students from third to eighth grade a variety of subjects as a cross-categorical mild-moderate special education teacher. I then spent two years in school administration as the Director of Special Education for the same school where I had been a teacher.
During this time, I also became intersted in linguistics and took my first graduate level linguistic course at University of North Dakota in Grand Forks in the summer of 2009. It was during this summer I first became aware of the field of sign langauge linguistics. When I left education in 2012, I joined SIL International and moved to the Philippines. I lived in Manila, Philippines for five years and learned FSL (Filipino Sign Language) as my first sign langauge. During these years I also was able to meet leaders from deaf communities in several Asian countries. It was during this time period I became aware of language deprivation and the importance of early language access.
In 2018, I returned the United States and began the PhD program in Linguistics at UCSD (University of California San Diego) the following year in 2019.
NSF DDRI: My Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the Lingusitics Program of the National Science Foundation: “Emergence of argument ordering: Effects of age of acquisition in emerging sign languages” provides research costs for me to complete my dissertation research.
The Linguistics Program supports basic science in the domain of human language, encompassing investigations of the grammatical properties of individual human languages, and of natural language in general. Research areas include syntax, linguistic semantics and pragmatics, morphology, phonetics, and phonology.
NIH F31: I am pleased to announce I have been awarded an NIH NRSA Fellowship from NIDCD for my project: "Effects of age of acquisition and of community on argument ordering"
The objective of the Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (F31) is to provide support for promising doctoral candidates who will be performing dissertation research relevant to the missions of the participating NIH institutes during the tenure of the award.
I hope these opportunities allow me to better support the deaf communities of the Pacific as I finish my dissertation.
Miles, R., Lynne Nielson, S., İlkbaşaran, D., & Mayberry, R. I. (2025). An embodied multi-articulatory multimodal language framework: A commentary on Karadöller, Sümer and Özyürek. First Language, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237251326977
Miles, R., Hatrak, M., Ilkbasaran, D. and Mayberry, R. I. (2024). “Argument ordering in simple sentences is affected by age of first language acquisition: Evidence from late first language signers of ASL.” Journal of Child Language 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000924000400