Melissa Bowerman

[Philip Dale]

Some years ago, Roger Brown introduced Melissa as "the Jane Austen of
psycholinguistics," which seemed then, and now, to be wonderfully apt. Her
gift was to show how some wonderfully observed details of language
acquisition could teach us major lessons about both the phenomena and the
explanation of language acquisition. More than that, she did it all with
exquisite clarity, wit, and grace.  A great scholar and friend.

 

Philip S. Dale, Professor and Chair

Speech & Hearing Sciences

University of New Mexico

 

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 12:44 PM, Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu> wrote:

Dear friends and colleagues,

It's with great personal sadness that I announce the death of Melissa
Bowerman, on 31 October 2011, in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

For the past forty years Melissa Bowerman has been a central force in the
field of child language development, contributing influential data and
theory on the relations between language and cognition in both children and
adults. She was one of the first to look closely at what children's errors
could reveal about semantic development and published classic studies of her
own children's causative verbs and prepositional choices in locative
constructions. What she discovered from her analyses was that children
extract systematic but quite abstract patterns in the semantic structure of
the language being acquired. Moreover, some errors emerge rather late, after
a period of apparently correct usage. This strongly suggested that children
don't come to language with ready-made meanings to attach to word-forms.
Rather, they have to discover those patterns first and then put them to use.

Bowerman was always interdisciplinary in her work: she drew on findings from
developmental psychology, cognitive and linguistic anthropology, and
linguistics. She was a pioneer in the use of experimental and ethnographic
data, across a range of languages, as she examined how language shapes both
cognitive and linguistic development in the young child, and how different
languages subtly influence adult categorization of such spatial relations as
containment and support.

She was an innovator in the methods she used in her research, using
correspondence analysis and multidimensional scaling to analyze data as she
explored the conceptual bases of semantic categories. She made especially
important contributions in her research on spatial cognition and language,
linguistic argument structure, event representation, and children's emerging
linguistic expressions of causality. On the theoretical side, she always
sought to disentangle what might be innate from what could be learned in
first language acquisition, and her insights as well as her findings cast
new light on typology, language universals, and human cognition. Throughout
her life, she focussed on how individual languages could have particular
effects on the course and content of language development, and what the
implications were for adult mental life.

Melissa Bowerman had a perpetually inquiring mind, and was fascinated by all
kinds of domains -- from birds, plants, knots, and dreams to her flute
music. She would always find a new angle on the domain under discussion and
pursue it with curiosity and interest, so lunchtimes at the Max-Planck-
Institute of Psycholinguistics where she spent most of her professional
life, were a constant source of enjoyment for whoever was there. She was
modest, generous, lucid, and always scholarly in her approach.

She is survived by her husband Wijbrandt van Schuur, her three
daughters--Christy, Eva, and Claartje--and four grandchildren.

Eve V. Clark
Stanford University
President, International Association for the Study of Child Language

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-- 
Lorraine McCune, EdD
Chair, Department of Educational Psychology
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers University
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Ph: 732-932-7496 ex. 8310
FAX: 732932-6829

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<http://www.gse.rutgers.edu/> 


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