La ricerca sulla Lingua dei Segni in Italia: Passato, presente e prospettive future.

This chapter describes sign language research from early 1980s, when it first started in Italy, to the present day, startiung from the first explorations conducted in the early years by the Institute of Psychology of CNR (now called Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies), to the more recent researches developed also by several universities in Italy. The chapter describes also language-external, sociolinguistic factors, highlighting those triggered by research on sign language in the span of thirty years (1981-2011), often producing shifts in the language attitudes of the italian Deaf community.