ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s, an extensive body of scholarly work by Elizabeth Bates has addressed significant and important questions facing the cognitive sciences. In numerous articles and books, Bates and colleagues have tackled core issues in the debate about the origins of grammar, and in so doing, have helped to clarify many issues in the well-known struggles between nativism vs. empiricism and domain-specificity vs, domain-generality. Through accessible prose, clever metaphors and apt analogies, her contributions have helped the field to tighten contrasts and clarify thinking on these classic debates. Her perspective has also helped us to move beyond the “same old” arguments by illuminating other important distinctions such as, content vs. process, heterotypic vs. homotypic continuity, emergence vs. learning, hard vs. soft constraints, and universals vs. individual differences (to name only a few). Beginning in the early 1970s, Bates and colleagues from around the world took their “hunches about how to conduct and interpret crosslinguistic studies of language learning” (Thelen & Bates, 2003, p. 384), and built an extensive research machine that continues to amass an impressive body of knowledge about the nature of language and language learning.
