ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a psychological perspective as one that adopts an empirical approach to children's thinking and learning as a result of their interactions with both the books themselves and with adults. It focuses on the role of picturebooks for children's oral language and print skills, as well as on the critical role of adult conversation for children's learning from picturebooks. The chapter presents the history of this body of research, along with some of the research methods used, to further aid understanding of the present state of the field. Research on picturebook reading from a psychological perspective arguably began as an offshoot of the psychological study of children's language. Picturebook reading quickly emerged as an especially facilitative context for parent-child interactions that supported children's language learning.
