Cognitive Science

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. 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.[6] She was a main proponent of the functionalist view of grammar, in that communication is the main force that drives language's natural forms.[7] This view provides support for Bates’ widely known perspective: the brain does not use specialized linguistic centers, but instead employs general cognitive abilities in order to solve a communicative conundrum.[8] Much of her research provided evidence towards the core principles of empiricism and against the nativist school of thought, which made her a major player in the East Pole-West Pole divide of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. 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. 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. 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. She demonstrated that neural plasticity allows children with damage to the right hemisphere or the left hemisphere to learn and use language within normal range.

None

Category:
Linguistics

Completion Status:
yes

Patent Number:
N/A

Co-Inventor:
None