Picturebooks, understood as a series of meaningful text-picture relations, are increasingly acknowledged as an autonomous sub-genre of children’s literature. Being highly complex aesthetic products, their use is deeply embedded in specific situations of joint attention between a caregiver and a child. This volume focuses on the question of what children may learn from looking at picturebooks, whether printed in a book format, created in a digital format, or self-produced by educationalists and researchers.

Interest in the relationship between cognitive processes and children’s literature is growing rapidly, and in this book, theoretical frameworks such as cognitive linguistics, cognitive narratology, cognitive poetics, and cognitive psychology, have been applied to the analysis of children’s literature. Chapters gather empirical research from the fields of literary studies, linguistics and cognitive psychology together for the first time to build a cohesive understanding of how picturebooks assist learning and development.

International contributions explore:

• • language acquisition
  • the child’s cognitive development
  • emotional development
  • literary acquisition ("literary literacy")
  • visual literacy.

Divided into three parts considering symbol-based learning, co-constructed learning, and learning language skills, this cross-disciplinary volume will appeal to researchers, students and professionals engaged in children’s literature and literacy studies, as well as those from the fields of cognitive and developmental psychology, linguistics, and education.

Understanding Learning from Picturebooks: an Introduction. Part 1: Symbol-based Learning in Picturebooks Picturebooks and Early Literacy. How Do Picturebooks Support Early Conceptual and Narrative Development?. An Examination of Factors that Affect Young Children’s Learning and Transfer from Picturebooks. What the Child Can Learn from Simple Descriptive Picturebooks. An Inquiry into Lastwagen/Trucks by Paul Stickland. The Development of Color Vision and of the Ability to Appreciate Color in Picturebooks. Part 2: Co-constructed Learning from Picturebooks Gesturing in Joint Book Reading. Growing Vocabulary in the Context of Shared Book Reading. The Role of Distributed Cognition in Early Explorations of Symbolic Expression. Affective Interaction During Classroom Picturebook Reading. Part 3: Learning Language Skills from Picturebooks Word Learning via Shared Storybook Reading. What Good is a Picturebook? Developing Children’s Oral Language and Literacy Through Shared Picturebook Reading. Tense Acquisition with Picturebooks.