The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories have been renamed the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories in honor and remembrance of Elizabeth Bates who passed away in December 2003.

Dr. Bates was a founding member of the Cognitive Science Department at University of California at San Diego (the first of its kind in the world), the Director of the federally-funded UCSD Project in Cognitive and Neural Development, a founding co-director of the innovative Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders at San Diego State University and UCSD, and the Director of the Center for Research in Language and Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD. With strengths in developmental psychology, linguistics, neurology, and cognitive science, she carried out many creative and influential collaborative studies on the interrelations among language acquisition, brain function, symbolic growth, and other key aspects of development. During her extensive career, she directed cross-linguistic studies on 4 continents and authored or co-authored 10 books and more than 200 scientific publications. Her work was interdisciplinary, influencing diverse fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, biology, psychology, computer science, and medicine.

The work by Dr. Bates and her colleagues in the 1970s and 1980s provided the groundwork for the Communicative Development Inventories and she became a central contributor to the inception and subsequent expansion of the instruments in the 1990s. Her energy, enthusiasm, and remarkable insight inspired and guided her MacArthur colleagues in the development and expansion of the inventories and supporting products.