ABSTRACT
The power of symbolic systems to mediate and organize people’s experience of the
world is central to modern cultures. For many years, Katherine Nelson’s work has
touched on developmental processes underlying acquisition of symbolic systems,
especially spoken language. This work has substantially influenced interest in and
empirical research on how multiple factors dynamically converge to support chil-
dren’s progress in complex symbol systems. More broadly, over the past 20 years,
there has been a strong expansion of studies on children’s narrative, vocabulary,
syntax, and literacy development that strive to capture the embeddedness of chil-
dren’s learning in meaningful, socially rich, scaffolding exchanges with those
more expert in these systems-adults in most studies, but with some attention as
well to siblings and peers. Implicit in much of this work is that children’s progress
in other symbolic systems-notably, art, music, dance, and multidomain produc-
tions-may similarly depend on the “who and how” of the child’s interactions
with other more expert symbol users. This chapter argues that the writing of Nel-
son and her colleagues converges very well with other investigators in identifying
key theoretical processes, remarkable individual differences, and many rich pat-
terns of child-other interactions that have the potential to contribute to specific de-
velopmental advances by the child.
