Katherine Nelson (1930 – August 10, 2018) was an American
developmental psychologist
Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, ...
,
and professor.
Education
Nelson completed her dissertation research on the organization of
free recall
Free recall is a common task in the psychological study of memory. In this task, participants study a list of items on each trial, and then are prompted to recall the items in any order. Items are usually presented one at a time for a short du ...
of verbal information in children at the
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a Normal school, teachers colle ...
, under the guidance of W. E. Jeffrey and T. Trabasso. She was a member of the faculty of
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
prior to joining the faculty of the Graduate Center, CUNY, in 1978.
Career
Nelson was a professor emerita of psychology at the
Graduate Center
The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York (CUNY Graduate Center) is a public
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public ...
,
City University of New York
The City University of New York ( CUNY; , ) is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven senior colleges, seven community colleges and seven pr ...
(CUNY).
Jerome Bruner
Jerome Seymour Bruner (October 1, 1915 – June 5, 2016) was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at ...
described Nelson as a "contextual functionalist" seeking "the contexts that give human acts their meaning" while investigating the functions that these acts play in longer-term scenarios.
[.] Similarly,
Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello (born January 18, 1950) is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.
Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he i ...
highlighted Nelson's emphasis on "the function of language and linguistic concepts in children's larger conceptual and social lives and, conversely, how children's emerging understanding of the function of linguistic symbols in larger conceptual and social structures makes language acquisition possible." In addition to conducting seminal research on children's
language development
Language development in humans is a process starting early in life. Infants start without knowing a language, yet by 10 months, babies can distinguish speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some research has shown that the earliest learning begi ...
and its relation to social and
cognitive development
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult bra ...
, Nelson studied
childhood amnesia
Childhood amnesia, also called infantile amnesia, is the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories (memories of situations or events) before the age of two to four years, as well as the period before the age of ten of which some older adul ...
and the development of
episodic memory
Episodic memory is the memory of everyday events (such as times, location geography, associated emotions, and other contextual information) that can be explicitly stated or conjured. It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred ...
.
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
Crib talk or crib speech is pre-sleep monologue made by young children while in bed. This starts somewhere around one-and-a-half years and usually ends by about two-and-a-half years of age, though children can continue longer.Weir RH. (1962). Langu ...
(pre-sleep monologues).
Her book ''Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind'' (Cambridge University Press, 1998) stands in contrast to the theories of
Jean Piaget
Jean William Fritz Piaget (, , ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology ...
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. In collaboration with her former doctoral student
Robyn Fivush
Robyn Fivush is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University, College of Arts and Sciences in Atlanta, GA. She is well known for her research on parent-child narrative (i ...
, she developed a theory that parent-child reminiscing about the past plays a foundational role in the formation of
autobiographical memory
Autobiographical memory is a memory system consisting of episodes recollected from an individual's life, based on a combination of episodic (personal experiences and specific objects, people and events experienced at particular time and place) an ...
.
She is also the author or co-author of:
*''Structure and Strategy in Learning to Talk'' (University of Chicago Press, 1973)
*''Young Children's Knowledge of Relational Terms: Some ifs, ors, and buts'' (with Lucia A. French, Springer-Verlag, 1985)
*''Making Sense: The Acquisition of Shared Meaning'' (Academic Press, 1985)
*''Event Knowledge: Structure and Function in Development'' (with Janice Gruendel, Psychology Press, 1986)
*''Sociocultural Psychology: Theory and Practice of Doing and Knowing'' (with Ethel Tobach, Cambridge University Press, 1995)
*''Conceptual Development: Piaget's Legacy'' (with Ellin Kofsky Scholnick, Susan A. Gelman, and
Patricia H. Miller
Patricia Hackney Miller (born 1945) is a developmental psychologist known for her research on cognitive development during early childhood. She holds the position of Professor of Psychology at San Francisco State University.
Miller is a Fellow ...
, Psychology Press, 1999)
*''Young Minds in Social Worlds: Experience, Meaning, and Memory'' (Harvard University Press, 2007)
Selected articles
*Nelson, K. (1973). Structure and strategy in learning to talk. ''Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 38''(1/2), 1–135.
*Nelson, K. (1974). Concept, word, and sentence: Interrelations in acquisition and development. ''Psychological Review'', ''81''(4), 267–285.
*Nelson, K. (1981). Individual differences in language development: Implications for development and language. ''Developmental Psychology'', ''17''(2), 170–187.
*Nelson, K. (1988). Constraints on word learning? ''Cognitive Development'', ''3''(3), 221–246.
*Nelson, K. (1993). The psychological and social origins of autobiographical memory. ''Psychological Science'', ''4''(1), 7–14.
*Nelson, K., Skwerer, D. P., Goldman, S., Henseler, S., Presler, N., & Walkenfeld, F. F. (2003). Entering a community of minds: An experiential approach to ‘theory of mind’. ''Human Development'', ''46''(1), 24–46.
*Nelson, R. R., & Nelson, K. (2002). Technology, institutions, and innovation systems. ''Research Policy'', ''31''(2), 265–272.
Awards and honors
In 1999, Nelson was one of four recipients of the
Society for Research in Child Development
The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) is a professional society for the field of human development, focusing specifically on child development. It is a multidisciplinary, not-for-profit, professional association with a membership ...
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
The ''Journal of Cognition and Development'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal dedicated to the study of cognitive development in humans and other animals. It was established in 2000 with Philip David Zelazo (University of Toronto) as the fou ...
'' published a special issue in her honor. In 2008, Nelson received the
G. Stanley Hall
Granville Stanley Hall (February 1, 1846 – April 24, 1924) was a pioneering American psychologist and educator. His interests focused on human life span development and evolutionary theory. Hall was the first president of the American Psy ...
Award for Distinguished Contribution to Developmental Psychology and her book ''Young Minds in Social Worlds: Experience, Meaning, and Memory'' received the Maccoby Book Award from the
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It has ...
, Division 7.
In 2017, she was honored by the
Jean Piaget Society The Jean Piaget Society is an international learned society dedicated to studying human knowledge from a human development (psychology), developmental perspective. It is named after the highly regarded developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Since 1 ...
with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nelson, Katherine
1930 births
2018 deaths
20th-century American psychologists
American women psychologists
Developmental psychologists
City University of New York faculty
Oberlin College alumni
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
American women academics
21st-century American women