Katherine Nelson

Katherine Nelson

Katherine Nelson is an American developmental psychologist, a distinguished professor emerita of psychology at the City University of New York.

Jerome Bruner describes Nelson as a "contextual functionalist": she seeks "the contexts that give human acts their meaning" while investigating the functions that these acts play in longer-term scenarios. She has also studied childhood amnesia and the development of episodic memory.

Books

Nelson's book Narratives from the Crib (Harvard University Press, 2006) investigates the cognitive and linguistic development of a two-year old, based on an in-depth analysis of the child's crib talk.

Her book Language in cognitive development: emergence of the mediated mind (Cambridge University Press, 1998) stands in contrast to the theories of Jean Piaget and others that cognitive and linguistic development are independent of each other, and instead views language acquisition as a bridge that connects a child's social and cultural growth with his or her growing knowledge of the world.

She is also the author or co-author of:

Awards and honors

In 1999, Nelson was one of four recipients of the Society for Research in Child Development award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Child Development. In 2001, a symposium in her honor was held as part of the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, and in 2002 the Journal of Cognition and Development published a special issue in her honor.

References

Retrieved from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Nelson