Contact Information

During the Fall Semester 2001
please contact Dr. Prinz via e-mail:
pm@sfsu.edu

Dr. Prinz holds the title of Professor in the Department of Special Education at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Prior to coming to SFSU in 1989, Dr. Prinz was on the faculty at The Pennsylvania State University in Pennsylvania and the University Colorado (Boulder and Denver campuses in Colorado). Dr. Prinz earned his doctorate in "Applied Psycholinguistics" at Boston University. He has Master's degrees in Journalism from Northwestern University and in Communicative Disorders from Boston University and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.). Dr. Prinz is also currently on the faculty in the Human Sexuality Program at SFSU. He was elected by the faculty in the Department of Special Education to serve on the Executive Committee of the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education administered between SFSU and the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). Between 1995 and 2000, he served as Coordinator of this program. Dr. Prinz and Dr. Dan Slobin (Professor of Psychology at UCB) developed a specialization in "Atypical Developmental Psycholinguistics" within the Joint Doctoral Program. This emphasis relates the study of language behavior, its development and use by children and adolescents to atypical development and exceptionality, with particular emphasis on linguistic and cognitive differences and their social and psychological correlates. Dr. Prinz teaches courses in the areas of language acquisition in children, language differences and disorders in children, cultural and linguistic diversity, communicative competence and disability, language assessment in Deaf children, and research methodology. Dr. Prinz' research expertise is in the area of language and literacy acquisition in preschool and school-aged children. His interests include language differences and disorders across various language modalities--spoken, written, and signed. A major thrust of his work has been in the area of Deafness and the relationship between proficiency in American Sign Language (ASL) and English literacy. A specific focus of this research is on narrative discourse skills in ASL and written English. He has published articles and book chapters and presented papers and colloquia on this topic at national and international conferences. He recently lectured on this topic in South Africa, The Netherlands, Taiwan, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and Australia.

The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board in Washington, D.C. has selected Dr. Prinz for a Fulbright Scholar research award in Sweden during the 2001-2002 academic year. The Fulbright Fellowship is awarded to distinguished scholars and professionals worldwide who are leaders in the educational, political, economic, social and cultural lives of their countries. The principal purpose of the Fulbright Program is to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and those of other countries. In addition, Dr. Prinz was awarded a sabbatical leave from the university for the fall semester 2001. The proposed sabbatical leave and Fulbright activity extend research by Dr. Prinz on American Sign Language (ASL) and English literacy (funded through a Field Initiated Grant from the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services-U.S. Department of Education) by examining the relationship between skills in Swedish Sign Language and written Swedish. Dr. Prinz' cross-linguistic/cultural research compares the results of his American research to sign language and literacy use in Sweden. The project is a collaborative effort jointly directed by Dr Prinz and Dr. Kristina Svartholm, Professor of Swedish as a Second Language for the Deaf in the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Stockholm University. A major part of the earlier American study by Dr. Prinz and his colleague, Dr. Michael Strong of UC Santa Cruz was the development of the Test of American Sign Language (TASL) (Prinz, Strong & Kuntze, 1995). TASL was one of the first tests of ASL in the United States developed to evaluate the ASL comprehension and production skills of school-aged deaf students. This test has been translated into Catalan Sign Language (Barcelona, Spain) and French Sign Language (Geneva, Switzerland) and will be translated into Swedish Sign Language. Comparative, cross-linguistic studies of sign language and written language are underway in both Spain and Switzerland.