Dr Rose Stamp PhD

• PhD in Cognitive, Perceptual & Brain Sciences, University College London (UCL), 2013           
• MRes in Speech, Language & Cognition, University College London (UCL), 2009
• BA (Hons) in Deaf Studies & Linguistics (1st), University of Wolverhampton, 2008

Prior to joining the University of Birmingham in September 2025, I worked in Bar-Ilan University, Israel for seven years as a Senior Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of English Literature & Linguistics. During my time there, I managed the development of the Corpus of Israeli Sign Language. Between 2014 and 2019, I completed a five-year Post Doc at the University of Haifa, under the supervision of Professor Wendy Sandler, looking at the emergence of compositionality in young sign languages. I completed my PhD in 2013 at the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London. My thesis focussed on sociolinguistic variation and change of the British Sign Language (BSL) lexicon, drawing on data elicited as part of the BSL Corpus Project. 

My research focuses on the sociolinguistics of signed and spoken languages, with a special emphasis on language variation and change in established sign languages as well as newly emerging sign languages. In my current work, I take a corpus-based approach to explore language contact in Israel and the UK, between multiple sign languages as well as between signed and spoken languages, with a special focus on multi-identity groups.

In my current project, funded by the British Academy, we will examine linguistic evolution by looking at the full life cycle of sign languages, from their emergence to their shift. We investigate three sign languages at different ‘stages’ in their life cycles: (1) Israeli Sign Language (ISL), the majority sign language in Israel, is only 90 years old and represents a thriving yet young sign language, (2) British Sign Language (BSL) is a well-established sign language and at least 260 years old, and (3) Kufr Qassem Sign Language (KQSL), used by signers in a Palestinian deaf community in Israel, is undergoing rapid language shift towards ISL. This multidisciplinary project combines sociolinguistics and language emergence by drawing on the conception that language change parallels biological evolution. We address the following research question: What are the selection pressures influencing variant survival in linguistic evolution?