Sheldon Rosenberg was Professor of psychology for much of his career at the University of Illinois Chicago having taught previously at George Peabody College in Nashville TN. He was a pioneering Psycholinguist having taken his PhD with James Jenkins at University of Minnesota in 1958, publishing his first edited collection Directions in Psycholonguistics in 1965. From 1966 to 1969 he was research associate and Assistant Director of the Center for Research on Language and Language Behavior at University of Michigan. In 1980 he founded and served for five years as Editor of the journal Applied Psycholinguistics. One of his greatest commitments was to the study of the language of those with intellectual disabilities, co-authoring with his former student Leonard Abbeduto, the title Language and Communication in Mental Retardation (Psychology Press, 1993).