Sheldon Rosenberg, the Founding Editor of Applied Psycholinguistics, died on October 9, 2012, in Evanston, Illinois, as a result of complications from Parkinson disease. He was 82.
Dr. Rosenberg was born in New York City in 1930. He earned a bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College in 1954 and completed his PhD in psychology at the University of Minnesota in 1958, where he worked with the well-known psycholinguist James Jenkins. Dr. Rosenberg held research faculty positions at the Training School at Vineland (1959–1961), the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville (1961–1966), and the Center for Research on Language and Language Behavior at the University of Michigan (1966–1969). He began a faculty position in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 1969, teaching and mentoring graduate students in the department's developmental and cognitive program areas. He retired from the faculty in 1995.
Dr. Rosenberg's early research focused on the ways in which the semantic contextual features of words affected their integration into a coherent semantic representation during sentence comprehension, production, and recall. This line of inquiry began with a painstaking construction of a set of norms (Rosenberg & Koen, Reference Rosenberg, Koen and Catford1968) based on adult judgments about the extent to which various sentences conveyed propositions reflecting common, canonical events (e.g., “the dog chased the cat”) or possible, but less likely to occur, events (e.g., “the dog scared the goat”). He and his colleagues then traced the developmental emergence of the sensitivity to this propositional variation in semantic integration in comprehension, memory, and language production from childhood into adulthood (e.g., Rosenberg, Reference Rosenberg1968, Reference Rosenberg1969; Rosenberg & Jarvella, Reference Rosenberg and Jarvella1970; Rosenberg, Jarvella, & Cross, Reference Rosenberg, Jarvella and Cross1971). This approach to language ascribed an important role for local dependencies between words and to experience and thus, foreshadowed elements of emergentist accounts of language learning and current research focused on young children's sensitivity to statistical regularities in their linguistic input.
A second line of research focused on individuals with language impairments, especially those with intellectual disabilities. Included were studies of pragmatic and syntactic deficits (Abbeduto & Rosenberg, Reference Abbeduto and Rosenberg1980; Rosenberg & Abbeduto, Reference Rosenberg and Abbeduto1987), which led to a metric for scoring complex sentences in terms of order of developmental emergence that has been used to study impairments in a variety of populations, including the elderly. Numerous chapters in edited volumes and a monograph also emerged from this work (Rosenberg & Abbeduto, Reference Rosenberg and Abbeduto1993).
Arguably, however, Dr. Rosenberg's most important and lasting contribution to the field is Applied Psycholinguistics. Although the first issue of the Journal appeared in 1980, Dr. Rosenberg worked tirelessly for much of the decade of the 1970s to develop the concept, identify a publisher, convene an impressive editorial board, and develop a format. He envisioned the journal as an outlet for hypothesis-driven research that extended cutting-edge research and theory in experimental psycholinguistics and language acquisition to applied problems. He saw the scope as including language disorders, reading, writing, bilingualism, second-language learning and instruction, and computer-based speech and language processing. Applied Psycholinguistics continues to thrive even in its fourth decade, with nearly 1,000 articles and reviews published to date. This success is evidence of Dr. Rosenberg's unique vision and enduring impact on the field.
Dr. Rosenberg was a skilled and compassionate mentor. He had extremely high standards for his students, but he also provided the support to make them successful and always treated them with respect, making them feel like colleagues rather than novices. In my case, I entered graduate school underprepared for the challenge. Dr. Rosenberg somehow managed to give me a chance and always championed my cause. He also knew when to push and when to give a pat on the back. I owe any professional success I have had to him.
Sheldon Rosenberg also had a lasting impact on every person he met. He had a booming voice and a hearty laugh, and no one told a joke with as much energy and enjoyment as he did. He also took great pride in his family. Whenever he spoke about his wife, Irma, or his sons, Eric and Jason, one immediately sensed his deep love for them and the joy they gave him. His daughters-in-law, Miriam and Sheila, and grandsons, Gordon, Clarke, and Graham, added greatly to his joy. Sheldon Rosenberg was one of those rare people who is able to balance a complete commitment to his profession with a complete devotion to his family. He enjoyed his life and gave great happiness to others. He will be missed greatly by many.
