In memoriam

The biographical information below is taken from http://crl.ucsd.edu/bates/memorial/

Elizabeth Bates (1988) Bates was one of the founding members of the UCSD Department of Cognitive Science, the first such academic department created in the United States. As director of the Center for Research in Language and the Project for Cognitive and Neural Development, she led groups of researchers seeking to understand the relationship between brain function and language learning. Bates had a global reputation for her pioneering work in child development and language acquisition. She also headed-up groundbreaking studies in the fields of post-stroke language affect, comparative linguistics and the psychology of adult language learning.

Among the most lasting of Bates’ contributions was research showing the brain's tremendous flexibility or 'plasticity' in learning language, demonstrating that children with injury to the language areas could still develop normal language abilities. She also showed that separate characteristics of the world's different languages determine the way that the brain organizes this information and incorporates it during development, adulthood, and in cases of disease. Her work also demonstrated the profound and lasting links between language and evolutionarily more ancient non-linguistic skills.

It was Bates’ general theory that linguistic knowledge is distributed throughout the brain, rather in one center for language development. She championed this perspective in the worldwide debate in cognitive science and used her understanding to create tools for other cognitive scientists to use in their probing for deeper understanding of brain function.