Epilogue: a tribute to Elizabeth Bates

Summary

When we had just finished our work on this handbook, we received the sad news that Elizabeth Bates had passed away. Liz had fought a courageous battle with pancreatic cancer for the past year, and continued to make significant contributions to science and education including her contributions to this handbook in many ways.

Liz was a shining star as a psycholinguist. Her work has spanned all major areas of psycholinguistics, including child language development, second language acquisition and bilingualism, sentence processing, speech comprehension and production, and language disorders in children and adults. Her research commanded many methodologies and perspectives, from simple reaction-time tools to modern-day neuroscience techniques, from behavioral methods to computational simulations, and from case studies to crosslinguistic comparisons. Her many contributions have had profound impact on not only the fields of psycholinguistics, but also the cognitive sciences and the neurosciences. Her impact is clearly reflected in many chapters of this handbook. For this Liz will be remembered by current and future generations of psycholinguists all over the world.

Liz was a close colleague to many of us. In research she wanted nothing more and nothing less than a strong international team, and she was clearly the team leader. She established not only a strong research group at UCSD, but also worldwide collaborations with researchers in Italy, Germany, China, and Taiwan.