How do children perceive illustrated books? How do they react to the interaction of words and images? How much of the message are they capable of absorbing? How do we learn how to see and to extract meaning from the visuals?
Arizpe, E. & Styles, M. (2002) tried to answer these and other questions about how children ages 4 to 11 interpreted picture books. They analyzed the reactions of 126 children to two books. They found that picture books increase the joy and the motivation during the learning process and were surprised by how much children were capable of extracting meaningful messages from the visuals.
The children in the study were capable of noting and decoding challenges like surrealism, intertextuality, suggestive games, multiple meanings and inconclusive endings. They understood colors, lines, design, metaphors and visual jokes. The children in the study had different reading levels. But, in general, all were capable of identifying complex clues, including social and moral aspects of the stories.
It was a positive surprise for me to learn that the answer to all those questions about how much children take away from picture books is, in short, a whole lot. I was unaware of how early we start to develop our cognitive capacity and of how soon they become pretty advanced.
In this context, it is easy to understand how visual books have become an essential tool for education during our early years. It is, in fact, pretty obvious why we acquire advanced visual interpretation skills so early in life.
As soon as we are born, we learn to identify our environment and closest relatives through visuals, sounds and smells. We start to build up our visual repertoire and to react to visual clues before we learn who we are, where we are and who we are with. Like when babies smile if they see their parents.
In the same way, we begin to learn how to attribute and extract meaning from visuals years before we acquire verbalization skills. It is interesting that so many of us lose those skills as we grow up, and raises questions about why that happens.
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References:
ARIZPE, E. and STYLES, M. (2002) ‘¿Cómo se lee una imagen? El desarrollo de la capacidad visual y la lectura mediante libros ilustrad.’ Lectura y Vida, 23(3). Available from: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/50859/ [Accessed: Oct. 27, 2018]
Sergio’s research & enquiry 