ABSTRACT
An important teacher often plants seeds that take years to come to fruition. I am increasingly struck, in retrospect, by how much this pattern applies to my long-term association with Sue Ervin-Tripp. As a graduate student at Berkeley in the late 70s and early 80s, I found it hard to make up my mind whether to focus my dissertation research on cognitive or language development (or to combine them, in the Berkeley style, in some sort of grand synthesis). I eventually opted for cognitive development, but in the meantime this indecision led me — along with much of the rest of my cohort — to attend every seminar offered by the department in both areas. These included several seminars with Sue Ervin-Tripp, which stood out because of her emphasis on the need to situate the acquisition and uses of language in sociocultural context. I was also struck by her occasional favorable references to Freud (who was otherwise pretty much a Great Unmentionable in our department), and, more generally, her suggestions that developmental research should take account of the role of children's emotional life. These were messages I duly noted at the time but (I now see) appreciated only imperfectly. For the last several years, however, as much of my work has involved the effort to integrate the study of children's cognitive development with the analysis of their narrative activity, the significance and value of these themes have now fully come home to me.
