Children's Understanding of Time in Picture Books

Abstract

Picture books are important for early literacy and convey information using both pictures and text. This study examines children’s understanding of pictorial and textual means for sequencing events in picture books, focusing specifically on ongoingness and boundedness. Ongoingness is signaled in text with imperfective aspect (English Verb+ING, was climbing) and pictorially through Moment-to-Moment picture transitions, in which a picture sequence shows stages of one event and little time passes. Boundedness is signaled in text with perfective aspect (English Verb+ED, climbed) and pictorially through Action-to-Action transitions in which pictures shift from one event to succeeding events. In this study, children (N=51; mean age=5.8 years) were read four stories modified to show a particular combination of text (imperfective or perfective aspect) and picture (Moment-to-Moment or Action-to-Action transitions) temporal markers. After reading each story participants selected “what would happen next” from four choices: continuation of current event, closure of current event, reasonable next event, or completely unrelated action. Participants also retold the stories and judged the duration of story events. Control tasks assessed knowledge of imperfective and perfective aspect and ability to order pictures in Moment-to-Moment and Action-to-Action sequences. Preliminary analyses revealed that female participants’ duration judgments were significantly shorter for stories with Moment-to-Moment picture transitions (F (1, 23) = 8.68, p = .007), suggesting that Moment-to-Moment stories were interpreted as reflecting fewer events. Although females’ results were consistent with expected interpretations, the effects of pictures and text on males’ duration judgments were non-significant. Further, males’ responses to “what would happen next” were more often completely unrelated to story events (21.9% of responses) than females’ (5.6% of responses). These results suggest that males at this age may have more difficulty than females using pictures and language to sensibly interpret narrative. Future analyses will consider children’s story retellings as well as results from adult participants to further deconstruct evident gender differences. These patterns in narrative comprehension will contribute to a greater understanding of children’s language development and of the apparent gender differences at preschool age.