Elizabeth Bates
Encyclopedia
Elizabeth Bates was a Professor
of psychology
and cognitive science
at the University of California, San Diego. She was an internationally-renowned expert and leading researcher in child language acquisition
, psycholinguistics
, and the neurological bases of language
, and she authored 10 books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. Bates was well-known for her assertion that linguistic knowledge is distributed throughout the brain and is subserved by general cognitive and neurological processes.
from St. Louis University in 1968, and an M.A.
and Ph.D.
in human development
from the University of Chicago
in 1971 and 1974, respectively.
She was employed as a tenure-track professor at the University of Colorado
from 1974-1981 before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Diego
, where she worked until 2002. Bates was one of the founders of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD, the first department of its kind in the USA. She was also the director of the UCSD Center of Research in Language and the co-director of the San Diego State University
/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communication Disorders. Bates also served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley
in 1976-1977 and at the National Research Council Institute of Psychology in Rome on a regular basis.
. She is survived by her husband and daughter, George and Julia Carnevale.
, cross-linguistic language processing, and aphasia
, investigating the cognitive, neural, and social factors subserving these processes. Through her research, Bates demonstrated that neural plasticity allows children with trauma to Broca's
and Wernicke's
areas to learn and use language normally.. Research in her lab also showed that adult aphasic patients' deficits were not specific to linguistic structures theorized to be localized to specific brain areas, not were they restricted to the linguistic domain.
Some of Bates's other major contributions included demonstrating that distinct characteristics of different languages determine the way that the brain organizes this information and incorporates it during development, adulthood, and in cases of disease, and illuminating the profound and lasting links between language and evolutionarily more ancient non-linguistic skills. With Brian MacWhinney
, Bates developed a model of language processing called the competition model, which views language acquisition as an emergentist
phenomenon that results from competition between lexical items, phonological forms, and syntactic patterns
, accounting for language processing on the synchronic
, ontogenetic, and phylogenetic time scales.
Bates was well-known for her belief that linguistic knowledge is distributed throughout the brain, rather than in one center for language development, and that language is dependent upon basic 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 a special stimulus that is processed by a specialized language module
in the mind, which can be localized to Broca's
and Wernicke's
areas.
Frequent sparring between the two sides, one based in California, the other in Massachusetts, led to the aphorism that much of cognitive neuroscience
lay within the dynamic pull of a west pole and an east pole
. Jeffrey Elman
, a colleague of Bates, called her the "queen of the west pole".
Li, P., Tan, L. & Tzeng, O. J. L. (2005). Epilogue: A tribute to Elizabeth Bates. In P. Li, L.-H. Tan, E. Bates & O. Tzeng (eds.), Handbook of East Asia psycholinguistics, vol. 1: Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tomasello, M. & Slobin, D. I. (2004). Beyond nature–nurture: Essays in honor of Elizabeth Bates. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
of psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
at the University of California, San Diego. She was an internationally-renowned expert and leading researcher in child language acquisition
Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...
, psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
, and the neurological bases of language
Neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methodology and theory from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science,...
, and she authored 10 books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. Bates was well-known for her assertion that linguistic knowledge is distributed throughout the brain and is subserved by general cognitive and neurological processes.
Biography
Bates earned a B.A.Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
from St. Louis University in 1968, and an M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
and Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in human development
Developmental psychology
Developmental psychology, also known as human development, is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes, emotional changes, and perception changes that occur in human beings over the course of their life span. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to...
from the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
in 1971 and 1974, respectively.
She was employed as a tenure-track professor at the University of Colorado
University of Colorado at Boulder
The University of Colorado Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado...
from 1974-1981 before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...
, where she worked until 2002. Bates was one of the founders of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD, the first department of its kind in the USA. She was also the director of the UCSD Center of Research in Language and the co-director of the San Diego State University
San Diego State University
San Diego State University , founded in 1897 as San Diego Normal School, is the largest and oldest higher education facility in the greater San Diego area , and is part of the California State University system...
/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communication Disorders. Bates also served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
in 1976-1977 and at the National Research Council Institute of Psychology in Rome on a regular basis.
Death
Bates died at age 56 after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancerPancreatic cancer
Pancreatic cancer refers to a malignant neoplasm of the pancreas. The most common type of pancreatic cancer, accounting for 95% of these tumors is adenocarcinoma, which arises within the exocrine component of the pancreas. A minority arises from the islet cells and is classified as a...
. She is survived by her husband and daughter, George and Julia Carnevale.
Legacy
The Elizabeth Bates Graduate Research Fund was established at UCSD in her memory to assist graduate students' research.Research
In general terms, Bates was an authority on how the brain processes language. More specifically, Bates' research focused on child language acquisitionLanguage acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...
, cross-linguistic language processing, and aphasia
Aphasia
Aphasia is an impairment of language ability. This class of language disorder ranges from having difficulty remembering words to being completely unable to speak, read, or write....
, investigating the cognitive, neural, and social factors subserving these processes. Through her research, Bates demonstrated that neural plasticity allows children with trauma to Broca's
Broca's area
Broca's area is a region of the hominid brain with functions linked to speech production.The production of language has been linked to the Broca’s area since Pierre Paul Broca reported impairments in two patients. They had lost the ability to speak after injury to the posterior inferior frontal...
and Wernicke's
Wernicke's area
Wernicke's area is one of the two parts of the cerebral cortex linked since the late nineteenth century to speech . It is involved in the understanding of written and spoken language...
areas to learn and use language normally.. Research in her lab also showed that adult aphasic patients' deficits were not specific to linguistic structures theorized to be localized to specific brain areas, not were they restricted to the linguistic domain.
Some of Bates's other major contributions included demonstrating that distinct characteristics of different languages determine the way that the brain organizes this information and incorporates it during development, adulthood, and in cases of disease, and illuminating the profound and lasting links between language and evolutionarily more ancient non-linguistic skills. With Brian MacWhinney
Brian MacWhinney
Brian James MacWhinney is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurological bases of language, and he has written and edited several books and over 100 peer-reviewed...
, Bates developed a model of language processing called the competition model, which views language acquisition as an emergentist
Emergentism
In philosophy, emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and as it contrasts with reductionism. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is in some sense more than the "sum" of the properties of the system's parts...
phenomenon that results from competition between lexical items, phonological forms, and syntactic patterns
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
, accounting for language processing on the synchronic
Synchronic analysis
In linguistics, a synchronic analysis is one that views linguistic phenomena only at one point in time, usually the present, though a synchronic analysis of a historical language form is also possible. This may be distinguished from diachronics, which regards a phenomenon in terms of developments...
, ontogenetic, and phylogenetic time scales.
Bates was well-known for her belief that linguistic knowledge is distributed throughout the brain, rather than in one center for language development, and that language is dependent upon basic cognitive processes such as memory
Memory
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
, pattern recognition
Pattern recognition
In machine learning, pattern recognition is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value , according to some specific algorithm. An example of pattern recognition is classification, which attempts to assign each input value to one of a given set of classes...
, and spreading activation
Spreading activation
Spreading activation is a method for searching associative networks, neural networks, or semantic networks. The search process is initiated by labeling a set of source nodes with weights or "activation" and then iteratively propagating or "spreading" that activation out to other nodes linked to...
. This perspective runs counter to the theory of Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
, Eric Lenneberg
Eric Lenneberg
Eric Heinz Lenneberg was a linguist and neurologist who pioneered ideas on language acquisition and cognitive psychology, particularly in terms of the concept of innateness....
, and Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author...
that language is a special stimulus that is processed by a specialized language module
Language module
Language module refers to a hypothesized structure in the human brain or cognitive system that some psycholinguists claim contains innate capacities for language...
in the mind, which can be localized to Broca's
Broca's area
Broca's area is a region of the hominid brain with functions linked to speech production.The production of language has been linked to the Broca’s area since Pierre Paul Broca reported impairments in two patients. They had lost the ability to speak after injury to the posterior inferior frontal...
and Wernicke's
Wernicke's area
Wernicke's area is one of the two parts of the cerebral cortex linked since the late nineteenth century to speech . It is involved in the understanding of written and spoken language...
areas.
Frequent sparring between the two sides, one based in California, the other in Massachusetts, led to the aphorism that much of cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...
lay within the dynamic pull of a west pole and an east pole
East Pole-West Pole Divide
The East Pole–West Pole divide in the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience is an intellectual schism between researchers subscribing to the nativist and empiricist schools of thought...
. Jeffrey Elman
Jeffrey Elman
Jeffrey L. Elman is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a well-known psycholinguist and pioneer in the field of neural networks.-Biography:...
, a colleague of Bates, called her the "queen of the west pole".
Honors and awards
- Boyd R. McCandless Distinguished Young Scientist Award Division 7, American Psychological Association, 1979
- John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1981
- Fellow-Elect, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1983
- Honorary René Descartes Doctorate, University of ParisUniversity of ParisThe University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
, 1992 - Honorary Doctorate, New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria, 1997
Additional sources
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2004). Editorial obituary: Elizabeth Bates (1947–2003). Language and Cognitive Processes, 19, 177–179.Li, P., Tan, L. & Tzeng, O. J. L. (2005). Epilogue: A tribute to Elizabeth Bates. In P. Li, L.-H. Tan, E. Bates & O. Tzeng (eds.), Handbook of East Asia psycholinguistics, vol. 1: Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tomasello, M. & Slobin, D. I. (2004). Beyond nature–nurture: Essays in honor of Elizabeth Bates. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.