John Doughty Bonvillian

John D. Bonvillian passed away in his 69th year on May 8, 2018, in Charlottesville, Virginia. At the time of his death, John was an emeritus faculty member at the University of Virginia (UVA). John was born in Caldwell, Idaho, to the late William D. Bonvillian, a U.S. Navy officer, and to Elizabeth Boone Bonvillian, an elementary school teacher. John joined the UVA faculty in 1978 and taught many thousands of students there before retiring in 2015. His principal faculty appointments were in the Department of Psychology and the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics. John received his undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University, earning his B.A. in Psychology in 1970. After receiving a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, he continued his graduate studies at Stanford University. Shortly after completing his PhD in Psychology, he joined the faculty of Vassar College in the fall of 1974 where he taught until 1978. At that time, he joined the faculty of the UVA. This appointment brought him back into regular contact with two of his professors from his undergraduate years, Mary D. Ainsworth and James E. Deese, who had each taken chaired appointments at Virginia. John was a fellow of both the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association. John's principal research interests were the development of language and communication skills in typically developing children and in children with disabilities. He conducted pioneering work on the acquisition of manual signs by nonspeaking children with autism, beginning in the early 1970s. A few years later, he began a series of studies that examined the early signing of infants and young children with deaf parents. The findings from these studies helped spur what became known as baby signing. These studies also showed the course of acquisition of the different parameters (hand-shape, movement, and location) that are involved in the formation of manual signs. Since about 2000, John devoted himself primarily to the development of a simplified manual sign communication system. The over 1,800 signs in this system were selected or created to be more easily remembered and formed by nonspeaking children. This was accomplished by including mostly signs that were highly iconic, that is they had readily transparent meanings. Signs that had handshapes and movements that were difficult for children to make accurately were modified formationally to facilitate their ease of production. Although the original goal of this project was to help children with atypicalities to communicate more effectively, the focus of the project changed in recent years. It appears that simplified signs, when paired with their spoken foreign language word equivalents, greatly increase students' abilities to remember the words. A similar process apparently occurs in disadvantaged children's learning of English vocabulary items. Assisting John in this project were Nicole A. Kissane-Lee, Tracy T. Dooley, and Filip T. Loncke. John was actively involved in programs to enhance the university community. One such program was the Optimist Club of the Blue Ridge; this organization focused its efforts on improving the lives of children in Charlottesville and surrounding areas. A second organization was Alpha Phi Omega, the national coeducation service fraternity. He served as the faculty advisor to the Theta chapter, the University of Virginia chapter, for more than two decades. The members of Theta typically engaged in over five hours of voluntary service to the community each week during the academic year. Finally, John greatly enjoyed his many years of being a faculty fellow at Brown residential college on Monroe Hill. John is survived by his mother, Elizabeth; his significant other, Vicky L. Ingram; his brother, William B. Bonvillian and his wife, Janis, of Great Falls, Virginia, and their children and grandchildren; his sister, Anne B. Beckenstein and her husband, John of Kalispell, Montana, and their children and grandchildren; and many dear friends. John's ashes will be place at the Columbarium at the University of Virginia at a later date.