Judy Kegl (Judy Shepard-Kegl)

MIT-trained linguist who, working in Nicaragua in the mid-1980s, identified that the deaf children of Managua's special-education schools had developed a genuine, previously undocumented sign language, and later founded Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc. to support the community she studied. She matters to this vault as a Tier-1 voice giving her own account of the schools' founding and mechanism — but not an independent one: she directed the Nicaraguan Sign Language Project that Ann Senghas joined, sat on Senghas's thesis committee, and is her co-author, so the two are one research circle rather than two. Her organization's own site, not a secondary retelling, is one of the two primary sources the vault's NSL founding-dates cluster now rests on.

References

• claim-nsl-emerged-in-managua-schools-after-failed-oral-spanish-curriculum
• claim-nsl-signing-community-grew-to-over-500-members-by-mid-1990s

Updates

• 2026-09-20 (propagation-repair): the summary paragraph was: "She matters to this vault as an independent Tier-1 voice corroborating Ann Senghas's own account of the schools' founding and mechanism". Now: a Tier-1 voice giving her own account, "but not an independent one" — she directed the Nicaraguan Sign Language Project Senghas joined, sat on her thesis committee, and co-authors with her (Kegl, Senghas & Coppola, 1995), so by 00-meta/specs/sources.md's definition (different author group and different venue) the two are one research circle. Propagated from the 2026-08-25 cross-model audit (claude-opus-5) of claim-nsl-signing-community-grew-to-over-500-members-by-mid-1990s, which made the same correction upstream and recorded the non-independence in that note's corroborating_source_note. Her Tier-1 standing, the mid-1980s identification of NSL, the founding of Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc., and her organization's place as one of the cluster's two primaries are all unaffected — what drops is the independence of the corroboration, not its authority.