“We were each put on Earth to torment the other,” says cognitive scientist Steven Pinker in reference to Elizabeth Bates, a psychologist who challenged a prevailing theory about how humans acquire language. Bates believed that language emerges from interactions between our brain and our environments and that we do not have an innate language capacity. To many, that sounds like an innocuous statement. But in making these claims starting in the 1970s, Bates challenged formidable linguists such as Noam Chomsky and, later, Pinker, placing herself at the center of a heated debate that remains unresolved half a century later.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Katie Hafner: In the 1970s, a psychology Ph.D., fresh out of grad school, decided to take on one of the biggest names in linguistics, Noam Chomsky. Her name was Elizabeth Bates, and over the decades she would become one of the most vocal opponents of “nativism,” which was Chomsky’s widely supported theory of language. And the debate that followed would change how many of us think about language and our brains.
Samia Bouzid brings us this story.
Samia Bouzid: In 1972, a group of linguists was hunkered down at a seaside villa in Croatia. They’d come together to hash out some ideas about how we humans acquire language.
One day, while the group was in the middle of their morning research session, a tanned young woman walked up the beach to the villa, carrying a backpack and a sleeping bag. She introduced herself as Liz Bates, and told the astonished researchers that she was there to join them.
Liz Bates was a grad student studying human development at the University of Chicago. She’d heard that this group would be convening, and she’d already planned a summer trip to Italy, so she thought, why not hop across the Adriatic Sea and drop in on them?
She wouldn’t be any trouble, Liz assured the group, adding that she would just sleep on the terrace in her sleeping bag.
Little did they know, she was about to cause some trouble– at least, for linguists and psychologists–by upsetting the apple cart on one of their most well-regarded theories. Or at least, trying her very best to.
Katie Hafner: This is Lost Women of Science. I’m Katie Hafner. And today I’m joined by Samia Bouzid who brings us the story of Elizabeth Bates.
Katie Hafner: Hey Samia.
Samia Bouzid: Hi Katie.
Katie Hafner: So today we’re talking about Elizabeth Bates. Andby the way, that story, which of course, I had never heard, is quite amazing. So just to recap, this was Liz in the early 1970s, she’s this audacious grad student crashing this meeting in Croatia, says, oh I’ll just sleep on the porch in my sleeping bag. So what happened next?
Samia Bouzid: So she leaves Croatia behind, heads off to Italy as planned, and then in 1976 she publishes a book. She’s just 29 years old, she’s just gotten her Ph.D., and this is her first book. It’s all about how children learn language.
And the reception was mixed, to say the least. Some reviews were positive, some not so much. One critic said she had a weak grasp of theory, and that she made “sloppy” category mistakes, either because of laziness, or an inability to write clearly, or just some basic misunderstanding.
Katie Hafner: Oh wow, that is harsh.
Samia Bouzid: Yes. And look, it is totally possible that the book really wasn’t perfect. I mean, this was her first book. But it’s also possible that the book just rubbed some people the wrong way. Because Liz was arguing that our basic language abilities are not innate. And that was controversial.
At that time, linguists widely believed that humans are hardwired for language and that we’re born with specific language skills that are encoded in our genes.
It all started…with Noam Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky: In a certain sense, I think we might even go on to say that language isn’t even learned–at least if by learning, we mean any process that has those characteristics that are generally associated with learning.
Samia Bouzid: This was an interview he did on a BBC show called Men of Ideas in 1978.
Katie Hafner: And Chomsky, we should point out, was the man of ideas.
Samia Bouzid: Yeah, he was a total superstar. I mean today a lot of people today know Noam Chomsky as a political activist, but he’s also one of the biggest names in linguistics. And in the 1950s, he revolutionized the way we think about language.
Before he came along, most linguists thought of language as a type of behavior that you learn…. not something that’s genetically hardwired. So the idea was that children learn to speak by mimicking the people around them, and through the feedback they get as they practice speaking.
But that didn’t sit right with Chomsky. He recognized that speaking a language involves a lot more than just parroting sounds. Like when people speak, they don’t just pull from a bank of phrases, they’re putting words together in entirely new ways.
Katie Hafner: I get that—so it’s like, you can learn to say “dog” and you can learn to say “potato,” but how can you learn to say “Hey look at that potato-shaped dog with the tuberous snout?” Right?
Samia Bouzid: Exactly. Exactly. And Chomsky also pointed out that every child with normal cognitive abilities naturally develops language, without any kind of instruction–and they do it quickly. So he took that to mean that humans have a language instinct–in other words, we don’t really learn language.
Noam Chomsky: It seems to me that if we want a reasonable metaphor, we should talk about growth. Language seems to me to grow in the mind, rather in the way that familiar physical systems of the body grow.
Katie Hafner: What does he mean by that? I mean people obviously do learn languages.
Samia Bouzid: Right. you weren’t born speaking English, you had to learn it. And, you know, Swedish kids have to learn Swedish words, and Brazilian kids have to learn Portuguese ones. Chomsky wasn’t denying all that, but he proposed that the basic circuitry our brains use for language is innate, and that thanks to this circuitry, there are some universal features that underlie every language. This was what he called this universal grammar.
Katie Hafner: So you have this innate language ability…but you also learn language. So how would that work?
Samia Bouzid: So the theory has evolved a lot over the decades. But there’s a switch box analogy that I found kind of useful as a way of wrapping my head around the premise. And I should be clear: It doesn’t reflect how nativists think of the brain today, but it was popular back in the ‘80s, when Liz was deep in this debate, and I think it’s a useful way of grasping how something like this could work.
Imagine you have a language machine in your brain. And then there are a set of switches that get flicked on or off depending on the specific language you’re learning. So, if you’re learning French, you’ll flick on a switch that means all nouns have to have a gender. And if you’re learning English, you’ll turn that switch off.
But whether you speak French or English or Icelandic or Cantonese, if you pull back all the layers, the basic machinery is the same. At least that’s what Chomsky believed.
Again, the theory’s evolved since then, and people aren’t talking about switch boxes anymore. But that idea, that there’s this part that’s innate, and then these parameters that change depending on what language you’re learning, that still holds. So that’s the basic idea and one of the things that Chomsky and other nativists have historically pointed to as evidence is the fact that humans are the only animals that have what they considered to be language. So as far as they’re concerned, there must be something innate in us that makes language possible.
Katie Hafner: So he thinks animals don’t have language? I mean, my dog, Newman, he has language. He understands many things. Like his best friend Carmelo, I say Carmelo, and he runs to the door to look for Carmelo. That’s language.
Samia Bouzid: Well, I know what you mean, but, but no, actually a lot of people don’t think what animals have really counts as language. So this is a very big and old debate. We’re definitely not going to settle it today. But I think what we can say for sure is that animals don’t seem to be able to fully grasp the kind of language we humans have. Because if you think about it, no one has ever been able to teach another species to use language like we do. And for the record, psychologists have absolutely tried:
Researcher: “Can you say what this is?”
Chimp: Cup.
Samia Bouzid: Katie, did you catch that sound at the end?
Katie Hafner: Uhh… sounded like a whisper.
Samia Bouzid: Hang on, let me play it again…
Chimp: Cup
Samia Bouzid: It’s a little hard to hear. But that was a chimp named Vicky saying the word “cup.” She’s also wearing a dress. But the point is, even though animals like Vicky learned some words, by the 1970s, animals are not talking. Language is seen by most people as a uniquely human thing, and the question is just why. For Chomsky, the answer was because we evolved that way. His theory was broadly known as nativism, and it was really popular.
Mike Tomasello: Everybody learned Chomsky. In graduate school, I learned Chomsky and it had a certain intuitive appeal to it, that there are these universal features of language.
Samia Bouzid: Mike Tomasello is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, who worked with Liz Bates for many years. When he was doing his PhD in the 1970s, Chomsky’s ideas were king. And it didn’t hurt that Chomsky himself was a sort of superstar in other ways.
Mike Tomasello: Chomsky was the one faculty professor in America who really stood up against the war in Vietnam. So he was a hero to people regardless of the linguistics.
Samia Bouzid: His reputation helped elevate his ideas, and those ideas stuck. By the early 1970s, Chomsky’s theory that language is innate was widely accepted. But Elizabeth Bates wasn’t accepting it.
Samia Bouzid: Liz came to linguistics through psychology. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, she had studied human development. In particular, how children develop language. And she wasn’t satisfied with Chomsky’s theory.
She had trouble accepting the idea that our ability to use language was just there, pre-programmed.
[toddler babbling]
Samia Bouzid: Liz started out by studying young children when she was in grad school, observing how they interacted with their environment and learned language.
And what she saw–in her own research and in her colleagues’ research–didn’t seem to match Chomsky’s theory.
Katie Hafner: Interesting… So, the way kids learn language can tell you whether it’s innate?
Samia Bouzid: Debatable. But some psychologists would argue it at least gives you some really important clues. So to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, Liz and her colleagues studied kids who were raised in different language environments, like Italian and English and German. And they noticed some intriguing differences. For instance, here’s an example from one of Liz’s own grad students. His name is Fred Dick, and he’s now a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London.
Fred Dick: So in English, the order of words is really important. So like if the dog comes before bite, he is very likely to be doing the biting.
Samia Bouzid: But word order is more flexible in a language like Italian. You can rearrange some words without changing the meaning. So English-speaking kids tend to master word order before Italian kids do because they need to. It seemed like in each language, the timing of when kids master these grammatical concepts depended on how crucial it was for their particular language.
To Liz, that suggested that kids weren’t just flicking on a switch and activating some pre-programmed ability, instead they seemed to be building out a new ability as they interacted with their environment or the people around them.
Katie Hafner: Right, like they’re custom building their language skills as they go… I can see that. I speak German and the structure is so different from English. It’s hard to wrap my head around the idea that there’s one universal language framework underneath all of these very different languages.
Samia Bouzid: Mhm. Yeah, and I will say, nativists have worked really hard to explain what unifies every language out there. But for Liz, seeing how kids kind of build different languages from the ground up just seemed like more evidence against universal grammar. She talked about this a little bit in this educational video we found from 2001.
Liz Bates: The more we learn about human languages, the more diversity we see. To give you two examples at opposite extremes, if you have a language like Chinese, there are absolutely no endings on words of the sort we’re used to in English, like dog – dogs, walk – walked. Uh, the way you would say the equivalent of “already ate dinner” in Chinese would be something that’s loosely translatable as “eat finish.”
Samia Bouzid: And on the opposite end, you have languages like Greenlandic Inuit.
Liz Bates: where you have a sentence that could be one word with 17 inflections. Uh, prefixes, suffixes, and they ripped apart the word in the middle and stick stuff in the middle too. Infixes. So you have this extraordinary extreme from this very, very analytic and, and austere system to this very synthetic and stuffing as much as you can onto the word system. And human babies have to come into the world prepared to learn any of those.
Samia Bouzid: By the way, that wasn’t to say that there was nothing special about our human brains. And Liz said as much in an interview on NPR in 1999.
Interviewer: Uh, Liz, is, is language innate? Are we born with brains hardwired to learn language?
Liz Bates: There’s gotta be a reason why human beings are the only brains on the planet that acquire language. Your dog doesn’t acquire language because he’s got a dog brain.
Samia Bouzid: Okay, so Liz was in the camp that other animals do not have language. Like I said, we’re going to steer clear of that whole debate today and just acknowledge for now that at least no dog has mastered Japanese like a human has.
Katie Hafner: My dog has!
Samia Bouzid: Oh yeah?
Katie Hafner: Just Japanese.
Liz Bates: But, uh, the question is, what is it about that brain that makes it the only one on the planet that can acquire language? Uh, the easiest answer, which is also probably wrong, is it’s because we have a language organ that no other species has.
Katie Hafner: So mean!
Samia Bouzid: Yes, definitely a dig at Chomsky there. But here’s the thing, Katie, if Liz was right, then that leaves us with a puzzle right? Because if human brains are the only ones capable of at least human-style language, but we don’t have a unique language organ…then what is it?What gives us the ability to speak?
Liz Bates: Well, sometimes I use the analogy of a giraffe’s neck, you know, if you, uh, look at the giraffe’s neck, it’s very striking, it’s clearly adapted for reaching up there in the trees, and they get the, they’re the only ones that can get up there and get those leaves, right? But it’s not a special organ in the sense that it’s something new that no other species has. It has the same number of bones your neck has.
Samia Bouzid: In other words, Giraffes don’t have a specially evolved totally unique reaching organ. They have a neck. Just a much longer one. And in the same way, if there was something special about the human brain, Liz thought maybe it was just that it was so big. It didn’t have to have specially evolved language circuits. Maybe it just has a lot more circuitry than other animals, so it could learn much more complicated kinds of communication.
Here’s Fred Dick again.
Fred Dick: Liz’s whole approach from the beginning of her career was really to think of language as being the product of our interaction with the world, and of many small tweaks over evolution that were not specific to language, but that really helped language along.
Samia Bouzid: But in the 1970s, Liz’s conclusions pitted her directly against Chomsky, and most other linguists at the time. And going against the grain like that made most people nervous. Liz’s close collaborator, Brian MacWhinney, remembers how people reacted during one presentation he did with Liz in Paris.
Brian MacWhinney: They just would have nothing of it because it wasn’t Chomskian, and so no one would defend us, you know, everyone would say it’s wrong, but then, in the back afterwards, they said, well, you know, we kind of agree, but we didn’t want to say it.
Samia Bouzid: In some ways, Liz was protected from all this. Mike Tomasello told me that psychologists working in psychology departments, like him and Liz, were under less pressure to conform. The debate was mostly playing out among linguists. But he said that people working in linguistics departments really had a lot to lose.
Mike Tomasello: Their jobs were at stake. Or even if they had an established job in a linguistics department, their students weren’t going to get jobs if they went against the grain too much.
Samia Bouzid: But as far as Liz was concerned, her data simply didn’t support nativism. And she wasn’t the only one having her doubts. Brian MacWhinney and Mike Tomasello were some of her only supporters, and little by little, a group of researchers started to coalesce around this theory, which became known as “connectionism,” or “emergentism.”
Emergentism is actually a concept that extends way beyond linguistics. Very generally speaking, it’s the idea that simple interactions can give rise to complex systems. And those complex systems are much more than just a sum of their parts. Which I know sounds really abstract, but this kind of thing, emergent phenomena, are actually really common all over the universe. So if you think about a beehive, there’s no architect bee with a whole beehive blueprint in its brain, but as bees interact with each other, the beehive structure just naturally emerges. So along these same lines, Liz and other emergentists believed that there was no blueprint for language in our genes, but that language emerges as simpler mechanisms in the brain interact with the environment.
But not everyone was convinced. Actually, most people weren’t. And this wasn’t just any old academic question. It was one people felt really strongly about… And I wasn’t sure why. I mean I think it’s a fascinating question, but I didn’t quite get why it was so heated and so personal—why people were afraid to speak up or admit what they really thought. And I’m still not positive, but in talking to people, there was one theme that came up a few times.
Mike Tomasello: I think a lot of people intuitively believe that the thing that distinguishes humans most clearly from other creatures is language.
Fred Dick: I think there is an element of feeling like humans are special. And this is our most special specialness, is language. And so I think there’s a kind of level of commitment to the theoretical debates that gets a little religious at times.
Samia Bouzid: It’s kind of like if our language abilities aren’t written into our genes, or hardwired into our brains, then what sets us apart from other animals? You know? What makes us human?
For Liz, having an innate language instinct wasn’t it. And so far we’ve heard a lot from her side of the debate, but after the break, we’ll hear from the other side. And the view is pretty different.
BREAK
Katie Hafner: Okay, Samia, so before the break, we learned that there were two camps—nativists, like Chomsky, and a smaller group of emergentists, like Liz. And this debate was about to get surprisingly intense.
Samia Bouzid: Yes, it did. And it worked out to basically East Coast vs. West Coast. So Chomsky was at MIT, and nativists kind of coalesced there, meanwhile, Liz was on the West Coast at UC San Diego, which was the home base of the emergentists.
And the two sides went at it. Fred Dick was there for some of those years:
Fred Dick: People were not very nice. The attacks were not just kind of intellectual. They were quite demeaning at times. And, uh, there was a bit of a pile on mentality I think.
Samia Bouzid: And this is something I’ve really wanted to understand more, because I had spoken to a number of Liz’s colleagues and friends, and you know I came away with this impression that she was this tireless scientist who was on a quest to figure out the truth. But obviously there’s a whole other side to this story—the nativists. And based on everything I was hearing, there’s no doubt to me that they saw things pretty differently. So I wanted to know what they thought of all of this, and of Liz.
Katie Hafner: I mean, who were these other, who were the other people? I mean, we know about Chomsky.
Samia Bouzid: Yeah, so I didn’t manage to get a hold of Noam Chomsky, although I did reach out to him.
Katie Hafner: And he is, for the record, 95 years old, as I understand it, and still going strong. But, uh….
Samia Bouzid: Yes, so that’s fine. He has better things to do than answer my emails. But I actually did get a hold of one of the key players from the other side, Steven Pinker.
Katie Hafner: Oh, Steven Pinker, I’ve met him, nice guy.
Samia Bouzid: Yeah, and for anyone who doesn’t know him, Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, and he’s written a ton of popular books about language and how the mind works and human nature. And I knew that he’d been around when these debates were going on, so I thought that he’d have an interesting perspective.
So we emailed him, and he wrote back right away and agreed to talk to me about Liz. But in that first email, he was kind of like, wait a second, Liz Bates, a Lost Woman of Science?
Steven Pinker: Everyone knew about Liz Bates. Everyone had an opinion on Liz Bates. She was a highly polarizing figure.
Samia Bouzid: And compared to her supporters, let’s just say Steven Pinker had a pretty different experience of Liz.
Steven Pinker: I think that she and I had probably symmetrical feelings about the other. That is, each one respected the other. Each one knew that it’s important that the other one pressed their case, but probably didn’t like each other that much, although at the same time with some mixed with some almost like a situation comedy, a kind of barbs and affection and sparring and respect.
Samia Bouzid: In other words….
Steven Pinker: We were each put on earth to torment the other.
Samia Bouzid: So, as we mentioned, these debates got passionate. But as far as Steven Pinker could tell, Elizabeth Bates could hold her own.
Steven Pinker: There were a number of people in the general Chomskian universe who were kind of bullies, and dogmatic, and she could out-bully the bullies. For her, science was war, and the object was to discredit, humiliate, obliterate your opponents. Now, you know, I say that with some caution because I know that there is, of course, a tendency to forgive that in men and to use it as a criticism of women, but I think anyone who knew her would say that she was fiercer than the fiercest men.
Katie Hafner: He doesn’t mince words when it comes to this.
Samia Bouzid: No, but I think it really reflects the intensity of what was going on back then. And by the way, this went on for decades. On the one side, the nativists weren’t budging. They were like, you just can’t explain the uniqueness and complexity of language without some innate structure.
And if you look at the human brain, there are certain areas that are usually dedicated to language, like the left temporal cortex. If you have a stroke that damages that part of your brain, chances are you’re going to have trouble understanding people when they speak to you. And Liz didn’t deny any of that.
Liz Bates: Under normal conditions, in the absence of lesions, left temporal cortex, in a domain general way, is a detail cruncher. It wins the contract for language use. It wins.
Samia Bouzid: That’s Liz talking about this during a lecture around the 1990s. But she’d also been studying kids with brain injuries herself. And she saw that kids could have really severe damage to the so-called language region of their brain, and they could still talk.
Liz Bates: Children with holes in their heads that you could put your fist through, exactly where the lesions cause aphasia in adults, do fine.
Katie Hafner: That’s pretty incredible. It’s, it’s hard to imagine.
Samia Bouzid: Yeah, and Fred Dick told me this story that Liz told him about something that happened at one of her talks. Apparently, a girl who was missing most of the left hemisphere of her brain showed up at this talk and asked a perfectly coherent question. And the emergentist felt like, that pretty much settled things, like there couldn’t be a specific part of the brain hardwired for language if language still existed even without that part of the brain.
Katie Hafner: But let me guess. That was not the end of things, right?
Samia Bouzid: Nope. Obviously, nativists recognized that sometimes the brain kind of reorganized itself, but as far as they were concerned, that didn’t really contradict the core idea that language mechanisms were somehow innate.
Katie Hafner: So where did this end?
Samia Bouzid: It didn’t. So each side just dug their heels in, and eventually some of them felt like they weren’t even having a debate anymore. They were just talking past each other.
Katie Hafner: Like a presidential debate.
Samia Bouzid: Yeah, exactly.
Katie Hafner: So what was this like for Liz? It sounds like kind of a downer.
Samia Bouzid: Yeah, but you know what, as intense as that debate was, everyone I talked to made it absolutely clear that Liz loved what she did. I mean, work was her whole life, and not because it was some chore or something, it was just because she couldn’t get enough of it. And this wasn’t just when she was a young, recent grad trying to hustle her way into the field or anything. This went on for her whole career.
In 1981, she got married to a physicist named George Carnevale, and in 1983, they had a daughter, Julia. And true to form, Liz had Julia visiting the lab before she was even a year old.
Liz Bates: Okay, here’s Julia at ten and a half months. Brought some of her favorite toys to see if she’ll show off.
Katie Hafner: Oh, I love that. So what were they doing with Julia in the lab?
Samia Bouzid: Oh, that time, they were just there for fun. But Liz and George actually did make a little study out of Julia. They kept this incredible written record of Julia’s development called “Julianotes,” And they just wrote down things that they noticed about her while she was a baby.
Katie Hafner: Like what?
Samia Bouzid: Mostly pretty ordinary things, but some of them are kind of hilarious. Here, I’ll read you one of them. Liz wrote, “My first impression, other than amazement at her alertness, was amazement at her incompetence.”
Katie Hafner: Oh man, I’m trying to think, what would it be like to have Liz as a mother, but in any event, I’d say high standards.
Samia Bouzid: Yeah[laughs] So this was their life. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Liz and George were both busy academics, but judging from what everyone told me, they also had really full social lives.
At this point they had homes in both San Diego and Rome, that was where Liz did a lot of her cross-linguistic research, comparing English- and Italian-speaking kids. But no matter where they were, their home was always just full of people. Liz’s colleagues, her friends. I mean, her colleagues were her friends. And it’s just, it sounds like she really drew people in.
Katie Hafner: All right, but here’s the real question. Did she manage to change people’s minds about nativism?
Samia Bouzid: Well she did gain some traction, because emergentism started out as this really pretty unpopular theory, and eventually it became a well established alternative to nativism. But she never really won the debate. It’s actually still not settled.
But that’s okay. This intellectual, academic debate–this was really just one piece of her career. She was doing work that had a lot of real tangible impacts too.
Like, she was coming up with techniques for measuring children’s language skills, and that had a real impact because it made it easier to spot possible language disorders early on. And one of her biggest discoveries was showing just how plastic the brain is when it comes to language. How young children can recover from really serious brain injuries and go on to speak as well as anyone else.
Katie Hafner: Like that child with the hole in her head.
Samia Bouzid: Yep, exactly. So Liz’s work reached pretty far and wide. And she also pushed people to look past their own narrow fields.
Mike Tomasello: What I loved about her was that she had this, a little bit of a revolutionary streak, always wanting to think about the bigger picture and what it means for the bigger picture.
Samia Bouzid: Liz didn’t think that you could understand the brain just by studying the brain. She was absolutely interested in how our brains are wired, but she was also interested in context, and the way things changed over time. Whether that was over a lifetime, over our evolutionary history, she was interested in how every crumb of knowledge and experience we gain from our environment literally changes us by reshaping our brains.
Mike Tomasello: She always had this dynamic, historical, evolutionary, developmental perspective, and a big-ideas-theoretical person. And that’s what made her so interesting.
Katie Hafner: So where did all of this lead to for her?
Samia Bouzid: Well, it all ended much sooner than Liz would have liked. While she was in Italy in 2002, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and told she only had months left to live. But there was so much she still wanted to do, so even then, she didn’t stop working. And, you know, her family knew how much she loved her work, but even for them this was a little bit shocking. I talked to her daughter Julia Carnevale, and she told me a little bit about it. Julia was a teenager back then.
Julia Carnevale: When she was sick at the end, I remember you know my dad and I kind of thought maybe she’d want to, I don’t know, like do something else, travel who knows, but she was just: “Nope, I’m going to my lab.”
Katie Hafner: You know, what she says rings familiar to me. There are several women we’ve profiled where this has happened. They get sick and they’re like, nope, I gotta keep working to the end. Just gotta keep going, as if they’ve just run out of time.
Samia Bouzid: That was one thing Julia said, that she just wanted to squeeze out every little drop that she could out of her life and her career. And so even when she couldn’t be in her lab herself, she still found a way to keep doing her work.
Fred Dick was one of the people working with her back then.
Fred Dick: When she was sick with pancreatic cancer her last year, I would go and visit her in the chemo suite as she was getting chemo, and we would write papers.
Julia Carnevale: She was just driven by the sheer excitement of discovery, and it was just so pure. I think you know, you know she she had a lot of friends she had a lot of like scientific enemies is my memory, like a lot of, she maybe rubbed some people the wrong way because she was just so passionate, and you can see that, right, and people get in their corners and I’m sure she did too, but um I do remember just like, you know, this woman really kind of like loved – loved this, you know, and that’s I really stood out and continues to stand out to me.
Samia Bouzid: After scrambling to do all this work, in April 2003, in the last months of her life, Liz and her colleagues debuted a brand-new neuroimaging technique. And then, in December of that same year, she died.
Katie Hafner: Boy, she really did not waste a second of her life. So what were things like after, after she was gone?
Samia Bouzid: Well, the debate didn’t disappear or anything like that. Plenty of people still challenged Chomsky’s idea of a language instinct. But from what I gather, the kind of sparring that was happening in the ‘70s and ‘80s stopped happening. So that’s not going on anymore. But that fundamental question of how we acquire language, that’s still there. And it’s gotten a little more interesting recently, ever since large language models like ChatGPT came into the picture.
Katie Hafner: Right. So, what do the linguists make of this?
Samia Bouzid: Well, some see it as evidence in favor of emergentism. Here’s Fred Dick.
Fred Dick: The advent of deep learning and the advent of ChatGPT has shown that indeed if you just give a machine enough information and not give it a sort of special purpose language learning device you can actually pick up the structure of language and use it productively.
Samia Bouzid: That’s because ChatGPT doesn’t have any built-in rules telling it how to conjugate verbs or order sentences. It doesn’t have any programming dictating how languages should be structured. But it still learned to use grammar properly. Which suggests that you don’t necessarily need any pre-existing structure to learn a language.
But Steven Pinker doesn’t think that that’s entirely relevant to the question of how humans got language.
Steven Pinker: You know, on the one hand, I often said, if one of those models could actually speak the way a grown-up human could speak, making fine grammatical distinctions, understanding completely novel content, then I would be willing to concede that models without any particular pre-programming for language could be a model of what the child does.
On the other hand, we do have to take into account that the reason these models do so well is that they’ve been trained on the entire world wide web, and that would take 30,000 years.
Samia Bouzid: In other words, this shows it’s possible to learn language without a special language box in the brain, but Steven Pinker isn’t convinced that this is actually how humans do it. And so, the debate goes on.
Katie Hafner: So all of this makes me think, I mean, we, we look at a lot of women who did something amazing, discovered something, invented something, and yet Elizabeth Bates, I mean, she spent much of her life fighting a fight she didn’t win. So what does that imply about her, her legacy?
Samia Bouzid: Well, I think that even though this debate kicked off Liz’s career and motivated so much of her research, it’s not by any means her only scientific legacy. Liz’s work seeded all sorts of new research in all the fields she worked in. She trained so many grad students who are still carrying on the work that she started. I think what’s sort of striking is that, based on what I heard from some of her former colleagues, given all that, given that her impact is being felt in all these fields, Liz herself is not as well known anymore as you might expect.
Virginia Volterra was Liz’s colleague and one of her closest friends from Rome. And here’s how she sees it.
Virginia Volterra: In Italy, she was very, very well known. When she gave a talk, she had hundreds of people coming. And, now, it seems that she is almost, not completely, but disappearing.
Katie Hafner: And why do you think that is?
Samia Bouzid: Well, some of her colleagues had some ideas about that. Virginia Volterra thinks the main reason is just that she was gone too soon.
Virginia Volterra: She died very early in some way. I am learning that, that if you live, if you can survive, you have more chance to be remembered.
Samia Bouzid: As for Brian MacWhinney, he thinks that in a way, her disappearance is partly because she was such a pioneer.
Brian MacWhinney: If you’re too much ahead of your time, that can be a curse.
Samia Bouzid: But whether or not people know Liz’s name today, or whether they know her name well and remember her as a thorn in their side, Liz mattered.
Steven Pinker: A lot of people really couldn’t stand her.
Samia Bouzid: Steven Pinker again.
Steven Pinker: But I think everyone respected her because she was really smart. And she was absolutely necessary to that intellectual ecosystem. So when I would write something, I would have to think, hmm, how would she try to demolish this? And you know I gotta say, that’s the kind of thing that makes you a better, a sharper and a better thinker. You don’t get a free pass.
Samia Bouzid: Liz had the courage to challenge the status quo and stand up to ideas she disagreed with, no matter who they were coming from.
And regardless of who got what right in the end, that kind of challenge and debate is what it takes to push science forward.
Katie Hafner: This episode was hosted by me, Katie Hafner.
Samia Bouzid: And me, Samia Bouzid.
Katie Hafner: Samia wrote, produced, and sound-designed this episode with help from our senior producer, Elah Feder. Lizzie Younan composes all of our music. And, we had fact-checking help from Lexi Atiya.
Samia Bouzid: I want to thank George Carnevale, Liz’s husband, who shared his memories of Liz, along with the recordings of her voice that you heard in this piece.
I’d also like to thank Ian Roberts, who took the time to speak with us and helped us better understand the nativist perspective.
Katie Hafner: Thanks also to Jeff Delviscio at our publishing partner, Scientific American. And to my co-executive producer Amy Scharf, as well as our senior managing producer, Deborah Unger. The episode art was created by Keren Mevorach.
Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We’re distributed by PRX.
Samia Bouzid: You can get show notes and an episode transcript at lostwomenofscience.org
Katie Hafner: And while you’re there, do not forget to hit that donate button. See you next week!
HOST: Katie Hafner
GUESTS:
Fred Dick, Professor of Neuroimaging and Director of BUCNI, University College London
Brian MacWhinney, Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
Mike Tomasello, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University
Virginia Volterra, formerly Director of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome
Julia Carnevale, Physician-Scientist at the University of California, San Francisco
PRODUCER: Samia Bouzid
SENIOR PRODUCER: Elah Feder
Art Design: Keren Mevorach; Photo: courtesy of George Carnevale
FURTHER READING/LISTENING:
Language and context: the acquisition of pragmatics, by Elizabeth Bates, Academic Press (1976)
Noam Chomsky interviewed on the BBC’s Men of Ideas (1978)
Tribute to Elizabeth Bates, obituary by Virginia Volterra (Cortex, 2004)
Beyond nature-nurture: essays in honor of Elizabeth Bates, edited by Michael Tomasello and Dan Isaac Slobin, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (2005)
The Language instinct, by Steven Pinker, Harper Perennial Modern Classics (1994/2007)
