Katherine Nelson

Katherine Nelson

Katherine Nelson (1930 – August 10, 2018) was an American developmental psychologist, a distinguished professor emerita of Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.Jerome Bruner 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 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 and its relation to social and cognitive development, Nelson studied childhood amnesia and the development of episodic memory.Nelson completed her dissertation research on the organization of free recall of verbal information in children at the University of California, Los Angeles, under the guidance of W. E. Jeffrey and T. Trabasso. She was a member of the faculty of Yale University prior to joining the faculty of the Graduate Center, CUNY, in 1978.

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