"Narratives from the crib" ... was critical in changing the views of many child experts. The project centered on a two-year old girl from New Haven called Emily, whose parents - both university professors - began to notice that before their daughter went to sleep at night she talked to herself. Curious, they put a small microcassette recorder in her crib and, several nights a week, for the next fifteen months, recorded both the conversations they had with Emily as they put her to bed and the conversations she had with herself before she fell asleep. The transcripts - 122 in all - were then analyzed by a group of linguists and psychologists led by Katherine Nelson of Harvard University. What they found was that Emily's conversations with herself were more advanced than her conversations with her parents. In fact, they were significantly advanced.