13 Facts About Elizabeth Bates

Elizabeth Ann Bates was a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego.

Elizabeth Bates was an internationally renowned expert and leading researcher in child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, aphasia, and the neurological bases of language, and she authored 10 books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects.

Elizabeth Bates was one of the founders of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD, the first department of its kind in the USA.

On December 13,2003, Elizabeth Bates died, after a year-long struggle with pancreatic cancer.

Elizabeth Bates was a pioneer and leading scholar in studying how the brain processes language.

Elizabeth Bates made significant contributions in the fields of child language acquisition, cross-linguistic language processing, aphasia, and investigating the cognitive, neural, and social linguistic factors subserving these processes.

Elizabeth Bates was a main proponent of the functionalist view of grammar, in that communication is the main force that drives language's natural forms.

Elizabeth Bates highlighted the reliance on pointing by infants in order to fill their need to communicate before they are able to speak.

When discussing the time period where children begin to speak, Elizabeth 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.

Elizabeth 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.

Elizabeth Bates found that regardless of the strategy applied by the child, they learn words at the same rate.

Elizabeth Bates did find strong predictive power in the child's vocabulary at 13 and 20 months old and their grammatical complexity at 2 years old.

Elizabeth 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.