Bates also served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976-1977 and at the National Research Council Institute of Psychology in Rome.
[7] This view provides support for Bates’ widely known perspective: the brain does not use specialized linguistic centers, but instead employs general cognitive abilities in order to solve a communicative conundrum.
In defense of communication functioning as a main force of language acquisition, she looked to the prelinguistic use of commands by infants that required them to develop and use social skills.
[9] The child's ability to incorporate imperatives in their gestures in order to make a command or request was found in her research and shows the necessity of communication regardless of language.
[10] Bates also coined the term protoword, a word-like utterance made by prelinguistic children that has meaning (e.g. yumyum), but does not represent the adult-like form.
[11] When discussing the time period where children begin to speak, Bates received a lot of attention for finding an overwhelming amount of nouns within the first 50 words of a native English speaker's vocabulary.
[19] In contrast, the same study presented striking evidence that similar brain damage has much more severe and often permanent consequences on language use when incurred as an adult.