ABSTRACT
The picturebook is a place of communication where readers perceive visual as well as verbal signs. Furthermore, readers are invited to explore them, thus making their own hypothesis regarding the picturebook's meaning. In this regard, interpictorial references emphasize the artistic strategies that are involved in the creation of a picturebook. Intertextual and interpictorial references in picturebooks are not a new phenomenon, but their significance increased with the emergence of postmodern picturebooks and crossover picturebooks. Picturebooks elicit the capacity to switch between the visual and verbal codes, because the illustration, complemented by the text, contains what the painting alone is missing as a means of total understanding, with its open and polysemic communicative content. The picturebook constitutes a basic resource for training the child as a reader, because it stimulates the extension of his intertext and guarantees the early development of metapictorial competence.
