Rosa Sánchez-Casas, Professor of Psychology at the University Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain) died on 22 November 2012 in Tarragona where she had lived and worked for the last 18 years. Her death is a great loss to her family, friends, and colleagues, and also to the field of Cognitive Psychology. Rosa left an indelible impression on all of us who were close to her and who had the privilege of collaborating with her over the years. We will always remember her love for research, her bright spirit, her courage and determination, her deep kindness, and the gift of her friendship.
Rosa was an active member of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP) since joining in 1992. She regularly attended meetings and congresses, and she frequently published in the (European) Journal of Cognitive Psychology. Her involvement in the Society led her to serve as a member of the ESCoP executive committee from 2001 to 2004.
In what follows, we offer some brief remembrances of Rosa, first from her closest colleagues in Tarragona, and then from others who collaborated with her.
José E. García-Albea (University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain)
[These words of remembrance have also been written on behalf of the old steady companions of Rosa in Madrid, to be mentioned in the text, and of all those who have been day-to-day close to Rosa and shared her last works in Tarragona: Pilar Ferré, Josep Demestre, Yolanda Almagro, Marc Guasch, José M. Gavilán, David Lobina, Natalia Catalá, Daniel Rivera, Cornelia Moldovan, Roger Boada, Teresa Viader, and Miriam Aguilar. We all will have to share now her very painful absence.]
My relationship with Rosa started 33 years ago, in the year of 1979–80, when she was in the last year of her degree in Psychology at the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM) and was attending a class I was teaching on “Perception and Motivation”. I was a newly appointed professor who had recently returned from a postdoctoral research stay at MIT, with the characteristic enthusiasm of a beginner and the inevitable desire of getting some positive feedback from the students. I was lucky to find an exceptional group of students, the type of students who provoke and motivate the professor with their talent, their level of interest, and their thirst for knowledge, and at least a considerable number of whom showed promise for scientific research. The greatest feedback I could get was that, as that year ended, some of the most outstanding students had become interested in the topics of research I was working on and were willing to collaborate with me. Amongst them was Rosa who, alongside Susana del Viso, Marisa Sánchez Bernardos, and Teófilo García Chico (José M. Igoa and Luis E. López-Bascuas would join shortly after), would form my first research group, which, in the 1980s, became one of the few renowned groups in Spanish Psycholinguistics. And Rosa would keep connected to the group, in spite of distance and time constraints. After presenting a magnificent undergraduate dissertation on the contrast between open class and closed class words in lexical processing, for which she obtained an “Extraordinary Award” from the UCM in 1983–84, she earned a 4-year scholarship from Monash University (Victoria, Australia), which allowed her to develop her scientific vocation under conditions that could not have been better, and to complete her PhD thesis under the supervision of Professor Dianne Bradley. There she became familiar with experimental techniques of great impact in psycholinguistics such as “temporal segmentation”, “syllable monitoring”, or “masked priming” and started orienting her research towards the comparison between languages and the study of bilingualism. Her Australian journey that marked her life so much, as well as the lives of her colleagues and friends in that country, also entailed a large enrichment for our group at UCM upon her return, thanks to a postdoctoral scholarship from the Spanish government for the period of 1988–1991. Besides notably potentiating the group's research activity, she started teaching as a professor in the Master of Logopedia at the UCM, and as a professor of Psychology at the Madrid Campus of St. Louis University.
During the year of 1992–93 I moved to Tarragona to be in charge of the area of Basic Psychology at the new University Rovira i Virgili (URV), which had just been created. Besides accommodating very diverse demands for teaching, the idea was to start a research program in language and cognition, as well as graduate studies in that field. This required equipment resources in order to build an experimental lab, but mostly it implied the creation of a new work team. As soon as the opportunity for a permanent position came up, I was lucky enough to once again count on Rosa to get the new project going, and thus maintain continuity. Rosa started in Tarragona in 1994 as a professor in the Psychology Department, where she stayed for the remainder of her career. Thanks to her enthusiasm, her clarity, devotion, and working capacity, with her everything was easier. The psycholinguistic laboratory was created and the new research group started gaining shape, mainly thanks to the new doctors and graduate students, some coming from the interuniversity programme in Cognitive Science and Language (coordinated by the University of Barcelona) that we enrolled in from the beginning. Rosa's role in consolidating the group was decisive, through her drive and efficiency when presenting projects, preparing publications and congress presentations, directing thesis and other research work, establishing contacts with other national and international groups, and participating in the organisation of various events that enhanced the visibility of the group. Regarding this last point, I would like to recall her unlimited collaboration in the celebration in Tarragona of the II Psycholinguistics Symposium (1995), the I Workshop in Bilingualism (1996) and the Conference on Language, Science and Society (1998), which were attended by Noam Chomsky, with whom Rosa established a very friendly contact.
Rosa's work over the last decade has been exuberant, multiplying in order to embrace her many functions, especially in teaching and research, but also in administration, maintaining international collaborations, and her social commitment to help the less fortunate. Part of her accomplishment in teaching has been the very active role she has played in the reorganisation of the psychology curriculum according to the Bologna Plan, while never neglecting her undergraduate and graduate courses. Despite demanding high academic standards she was welcomed by her students without reservations (she was voted liaison professor about eight times). In research, her focus was entirely on the subject of bilingualism and she had a share in situating it at the heart of modern psycholinguistics. She was especially interested in lexical processing and representation in Spanish-English, as well as Spanish-Catalan bilinguals, and explored the role of various types of variables in this context, such as age of acquisition, L2 proficiency, the context of acquisition and use of both languages, type of words in terms of degree of between-language morphological relationship (cognates vs. noncognates), or by virtue of merely formal and/or semantic relations between words. Regarding her work in administration and external relations, beside her involvement in ESCoP, she was also a member of the executive committee of SEPEX (Spanish Society of Experimental Psychology), project evaluator and reviewer of several prestigious journals, and formed part of the deanship of the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the URV, as well as several university committees, while at the same time intensifying her collaboration with other research centres, such as the Center for Language Science at Penn State University (Judith Kroll, Giuli Dussias, Janet van Hell), University of Pittsburgh (Natasha Tokowicz), and the Universidade do Minho in Portugal (Montse Comesaña, Ana P. Soares). Finally, as far as her social commitment is concerned, the importance of her work as a coordinator of the URV in the organisation of internships in rural areas of San Ramón (Nicaragua) where she travelled periodically in order to provide the interns with “in situ” guidance and support, need to be highlighted.
The life of Rosa, still young at her mature age, full of energy and with lots of ongoing projects, has been cut short by this dreadful liver cancer. But it was a fulfilled life, a clear trajectory of personal realisation and immense generosity towards others. She has left a deep impression on many, within the academic field and beyond it, as well as on the simple people she related with. Her leaving has created a void that is impossible to fill, but we trust that her memory and all we have learned from her can give us the best impulse to continue her work and the projects she had started. Finally, and with all the pain that it causes to see someone leave who has been your student, who has become your colleague and companion in a thousand battles, and even your leader: What better reinforcement can there be for an (old) professor, but to confirm with immense gratitude everything that he has learned from a woman who had been his student over 30 years ago?
Teresa Bajo (University of Granada, Spain)
I met Rosa in the ESCoP biannual meeting that was held in 1990 in Como, Italy. There were then a small number of Spanish people who went to the ESCoP and other international meetings on Cognitive Psychology. Since then, the number of internationally known Spanish psychologists has grown big, but I had the immense luck of belonging to Rosa′s generation of Spanish Psychologists who share the aim of introducing psychological science in our universities and research centres. Together, we went to the first Spanish Psycholinguistics workshop held in Tenerife (1993) and to the first foundational meeting of the Spanish Society for Experimental Psychology in Almería (1997). Since our first meeting in 1990, I have coincided with her in congresses, workshops, meetings, theses, and many other scientific activities. In each of them, I enjoyed our walks together and her insightful and positive views of many scientific and social issues. Rosa has died but she has let a big impression on me as a researcher and as a wonderful human being.
Rosa began her research endeavours under the mentorship of José Eugenio García Albea at the University Complutense of Madrid at a moment in which Psychological research in Spain was scarce and research funds were completely lacking. Together, they managed to create a research group and to start publishing in scientific journals, again at a moment when this was an exception in Spanish Psychology. Rosa was one of the pioneering Spanish psychologists who started a very productive research line on language processing. From the beginning she concentrated on the role of morphology in lexical access in monolingual and bilingual participants, and she has published influential and widely cited papers on these topics.
After a few years of her return to Spain she moved to Tarragona, a small University with a very small Psychology department. I have always admired Rosa and her colleagues at the University of Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona for all of the efforts that they have invested in moving their department forward. When they arrived, the Psychology Department was composed of a very small number of Psychology Professors who were forced to maintain extremely heavy teaching loads on every possible topic, in addition to performing many burdensome administrative tasks. They were never discouraged by these difficulties. On the contrary, Rosa and her colleagues invested every effort to continue to expand psychological research in Spain and worked tirelessly to achieve their goal. The last time I visited Rosa, she was particularly happy for her now well-established research group, for her steady level of publications, and for the new research lines and collaborations that she was initiating. I am deeply saddened that she had so little time to enjoy her achievements. However, her efforts are not lost, as her legacy remains in the group she helped to create and in the work that will continue in Tarragona.
Rosa was a generous and warm and endlessly engaged person. She liked to talk about politics and issues of social justice and always had time to listen to others. She did not understand research as an individual endeavour, but rather thrived via the creation of community and through the sharing of ideas and the shared discussion of her data. She collaborated widely with colleagues at Penn State University, the University of Minho, and in Nicaragua, among others. Everyone who knew her respected her not only for her intellect and focus but also for her warmth and generosity of spirit.
It is difficult to write this and to believe that Rosa is gone. I was lucky to have Rosa as my friend. There are no words to express my sadness at her untimely death.
Judith Kroll, Giuli Dussias, and Janet van Hell (Pennsylvania State University, USA)
Rosa was our beloved friend and generous colleague, a partner with us in research, an insightful scientist, a visitor to our research group, and a mentor to all with whom she interacted. In 2007, Rosa was a sabbatical visitor to the Center for Language Science at Penn State. We had the good fortune of having her in our midst for 6 months, during which time she initiated new collaborative projects, presented her own research, and gave freely of her time to all of us in the lab. In 2011, she and her group in Tarragona became a partner in our international NSF-PIRE grant, to promote opportunities for students in the US to conduct research on bilingualism abroad. She was an incredible mentor for the undergraduate students she hosted in Summer 2011. Rosa skillfully supervised their research and generously engaged them in all lab activities and seminars. She also introduced them to the Tarragona culture and way of living, including excellent food and running along the beach. Students described Rosa as having the unique capability of making you feel part of the Tarragona family within only a few hours.
Rosa was a psycholinguist whose research focused on cross-language processing in bilinguals. This topic has become popular in recent years and Rosa was one of a small group of psycholinguists who pioneered studies of the bilingual lexicon. What is remarkable about Rosa's work is that she tackled the most difficult aspect of this problem, namely how bilinguals understand the meaning of words in each language. In a long series of studies using clever methodology and bridging behavioural and neural methods, she, with her students and collaborators, investigated the way that aspects of the semantics influence bilinguals' ability to recognise the correspondences between translations across their two languages. She taught all of us not to be afraid to ask the hardest questions and to be creative in developing methods to begin to address them.
We have many stories to tell about Rosa but all of them have a common theme. She was intensely committed to social justice and to ensuring that all around her understood that they were responsible for their own actions and those of their communities, large and small. She was generous and she was funny. Until the sudden illness that took her life, she was healthy, a vegetarian and runner, who would run in circles so those who were slow and out of shape could keep up with her and so that those who had no idea how to cook with seaweed might learn. In the Spring of 2007, she lived in State College, sharing a house with Taomei Guo, our colleague from Beijing, China who was visiting Penn State. Rosa was Taomei's guide to Western culture, and each day the two of them discussed the pros and cons of East and West. They hoped to write a book about their life together in the US. We also cherish our precious memories of the week we and five others lived together in une grande maison in La Ciotat overseeing the Mediterranean Sea. During the day we attended the ESCoP conference in Marseille, and in the evening we discussed science and life while enjoying the delicious food Rosa and the other cooks in our company had prepared.
We have lost such a special person but we will always remember Rosa, for her science, for her intellectual commitments, for her friendship, and most of all for her heart that was so open to everyone.