Ted's father would often go to the Deaf Club, bringing the whole family.
He is married to Elissa L. Newport, also a professor in the Department of Neurology at Georgetown University.
Supalla co-authored with Elissa Newport the first work on the use of movement changes to derive nouns from verbs in American Sign Language.
[4] He also produced the seminal[5] work on the structure of classifier constructions and verbs of motion and location.
[6][7] He has published a book and several journal articles on the history of American Sign Language and the processes of linguistic change that introduce new grammatical forms into a sign language over its history.