Review
In this volume, Nelson has delivered an outstanding set of case studies and commentaries concerning the genesis of human language and thought. But because she has drawn her case students from a broad array of contemporary outlooks and modes of thinking concerning the realm of human phenomenology, hers is far more than a book about the structures and dynamics of speech and language. It is one that demonstrates, simply, the power of thought (admittedly, in these instances, the highly sophisticated thought of some very powerful thinkers--individuals no less luminous or further removed from the past excesses of case study than the likes of Jerome Bruner, John Dore, Daniel Stern, and, of course, Nelson herself) to elucidate the realm of human phenomenology in its early verbalized phases and forms..."Narratives from the Crib" is an absorbing, instructive, and richly stimulating assembly of commentaries on early childhood self-expression. It is instructive also with regard to how case studies ought to be made and rendered in relation to topics that are of scientific importance...The reader will encounter cleanly and compactly reasoned essays on the dynamics and meaning-generating communications of a loquacious and endearing toddler by authors who for the most part seem to ask more that our thinking be challenged than that theirs be simply received. -- Thomas M. Horner "Readings: A Journal of Reviews and Commentary in Mental Health" (09/01/1990)
Product Description
This classic psychological case study focuses on one talkative child's emerging ability to use language, her capacity for understanding, for imagining, and for making inferences and solving problems. In wide-ranging essays, scholars offer multifaceted linguistic and psychological analyses of two-year-old Emily's bedtime conversations with her parents and pre-sleep monologues, taped over a fifteen-month period. In a foreword written for this new edition, Emily, now an adult, reflects on the experience of having been a research subject without knowing it.
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