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Over the course of her career, Elizabeth Bates was a passionate scientist, a supportive mentor and a valued friend and colleague. She gave the field an extensive body of scholarly work and never shied away from tackling important questions regarding the origins of grammar, in particular, the well-known struggles between nativism vs. empiricism and domain-specificity vs. domain-generality. Through accessible prose, clever metaphors and apt analogies, her contributions helped the field to tighten contrasts and clarify thinking on these classic debates. She also offered us key logical and empirical tools to conceptualize how the amazing system of grammar can emerge within the context of human cognitive and social activity. In this talk, I review three ideas central to Liz’s work that were particularly innovative and insightful: (1) language is constructed by the child using domain-general mechanisms, (2) individual variation is a way for us to see how the language system is put together, and (3) lexical and grammatical development are linked in important ways. I will trace these ideas in recent studies on the impact of early lexical delay on the development of morphosyntax, the relation between speed and efficiency in spoken word recognition and growth in vocabulary, and links between lexical and grammatical development in bilingual children. (This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIDCD and NICHD), the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (TARP), the Callier Center for Communication Disorders, and the University of Texas at Dallas.) |
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