Picture books are an important source of new language, concepts, and lessons for young children. A large body of research has documented the nature of parent-child interactions during shared book reading. A new body of research has begun to investigate the features of picture books that support children's learning and transfer of that information to the real world. In this paper, we discuss how children's symbolic development, analogical reasoning, and reasoning about fantasy may constrain their ability to take away content information from picture books. We then review the nascent body of findings that has focused on the impact of picture book features on children's learning and transfer of words and letters, science concepts, problem solutions, and morals from picture books. In each domain of learning we discuss how children's development may interact with book features to impact their learning. We conclude that children's ability to learn and transfer content from picture books can be disrupted by some book features and research should directly examine the interaction between children's developing abilities and book characteristics on children's learning.

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This study investigated the influence of book genre (narrative or didactic) on mothers' language use during a book sharing interaction with their 18-to 25-month-olds. Motherchild dyads were videotaped sharing both a narrative and a didactic book, adapted from two commercially available books, and matched in terms of length, quantity of text, and target content. A greater proportion of mothers' talk was complex (i.e., predictions, text-to-life comparisons) during narrative book sharing than during didactic book sharing. Mothers also used a greater variety of verb tenses and referenced more mental states during narrative book sharing. These results differ from findings from previous studies with older children where it has been concluded that didactic books offer greater opportunities for complex talk than narrative books. The results also highlight the importance of taking situational factors into account when investigating parent-child communicative interactions.

When reasoning counterfactually, we think of alternative possibilities to what we know to be true about the world by imagining what would have happened had a situation been different. Research has yielded mixed findings and substantial debate over when this ability develops, how it is best conceptualized, and what functions it serves. In this article, we propose a framework of counterfactual reasoning in development. We argue that counterfactual reasoning is best understood by looking both at the representations of reality children manipulate counterfactually, and the cognitive processes that make up and contribute to counterfactual reasoning. In so doing, we highlight the fact that many of the component skills are present in early childhood. This framework yields testable predictions about children's counterfactual reasoning across a range of situations. We also discuss recent work that examines the contribution of counterfactual reasoning to learning in childhood.

In two experiments, one hundred and sixty-two 6- to 8-year-olds were asked to reason counterfactually about events with different causal structures. All events involved overdetermined outcomes in which two different causal events led to the same outcome. In Experiment 1, children heard stories with either an ambiguous causal relation between events or causally unrelated events. Children in the causally unrelated version performed better than chance and better than those in the ambiguous condition. In Experiment 2, children heard stories in which antecedent events were causally connected or causally disconnected. Eight-year-olds performed above chance in both conditions, whereas 6-year-olds performed above chance only in the connected condition. This work provides the first evidence that children can reason counterfactually in causally overdetermined contexts by age 8.