Elizabeth Bates

Elizabeth Ann Bates (July 26, 1947 – December 13, 2003) was a professor of

On December 13, 2003, Elizabeth Bates died, after a year-long struggle with pancreatic cancer. Over the course of more than thirty years, Bates had established herself as a world leader in a number of fields – child development, language acquisition, aphasia research, cross-linguistic research, bilingualism, psycholinguistics and their neural underpinnings, and had trained, supported and collaborated with a diverse and international group of researchers and students.[2]^[3] The Elizabeth Bates Graduate Research Fund was established at UCSD in her memory to assist graduate students' research.^[5]

Research

Elizabeth Bates was a pioneer and leading scholar in studying how the brain processes language. Bates made significant contributions in the fields of child

In defense of communication functioning as a main force of language acquisition, she looked to the prelinguistic use of commands by infants that required them to develop and use social skills. She highlighted the reliance on pointing by infants in order to fill their need to communicate before they are able to speak.^[9] The child's ability to incorporate imperatives in their gestures in order to make a command or request was found in her research and shows the necessity of communication regardless of language.^[10] Bates also coined the term protoword, a word-like utterance made by prelinguistic children that has meaning (e.g. yumyum), but does not represent the adult-like form.^[11]

When discussing the time period where children begin to speak, Bates received a lot of attention for finding an overwhelming amount of nouns within the first 50 words of a native English speaker's vocabulary.^[12] Bates helped settle an ongoing debate among linguists who argued that a referential language style, characterized by the child's first 50 words containing mostly object labels, was a better strategy in developing language than a personal and socially expressive language style. She found that regardless of the strategy applied by the child, they learn words at the same rate.^[12] She did, however, find strong predictive power in the child's vocabulary at 13 and 20 months old and their grammatical complexity at 2 years old.^[13] Bates finds that language learning comes from the neural plasticity in the brain; therefore, children can and are able to learn a language, even with brain trauma.^[14]

Domain-Specificity, Modularity and Neural Plasticity in Language Processing

Bates and colleagues also showed that after brain injury, adult aphasic patients' deficits were not specific to linguistic structures theorized to be localized to specific brain areas,^[15] or even restricted to the linguistic domain.^[16] Deficits and lesion sites instead overlap in the role that they affect speech fluency and complexity.^[17] Language is viewed as interrelated with cognitive processes such as memory, pattern recognition, and spreading activation. This perspective runs counter to the theory of Noam Chomsky, Eric Lenneberg, and Steven Pinker that language is processed in a domain-specific manner, by specific language modules in the mind, and can be localized to specific brain regions such as Broca's and Wernicke's areas.^[14]

Through her research, Bates demonstrated that

• Boyd R. McCandless Distinguished Young Scientist Award Division 7, American Psychological Association, 1979[21]
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1981^[21]
• Fellow-Elect, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1983^[21]
• Honorary René Descartes Doctorate, University of Paris, 1992^[21]
• Honorary Doctorate, New Bulgarian University,
  Sofia, Bulgaria, 1997^[21]