Language, Discourse, and Picture Books John Stephens (bio) Picture books are arguably a child's most important experiences of texts. For one thing, by being read to, children discover a lot about written language before they receive any formal instruction (Goodman, 1983, 69): they learn how print is organized; they learn the top-to-bottom ordering of English, and to some extent the left-to-right; they may also learn to regard print as a medium offering access to pleasure and information. Secondly, researchers studying conversations between parents and children have found that reading books stimulates the most complex speech, promotes growth in the child's vocabulary, and produces complex interaction between adult and child (Irwin 1960; Snow et al. 1976). Thirdly, through story reading, children learn the nature and function of connected discourse. Narrative produced by a two-year-old child consists of a bundle of unconnected utterances; it lacks linguistic connectives, and the events narrated may be randomly compiled. By the age of five, a child is capable of connected narrative with a climax (Kemper 1984). The ability to produce, first of all, coordinated structures ("The cat came into the room and thenit sat on the chair") and later subordinated structures ("After the cat came into the room it sat on the chair") is to some extent subject to cognitive constraints (Kemper 1984); such skills may not be taught through reading, but can be reinforced when the child has achieved capability. Looked at simply, language works by linking words together in a line, like the links in a chain.1 When this is done in a "literary" test—poem, story—we expect that the resulting chain will be more than a mere accumulation, but will have some direction imparted to it by the overall structure of the text. This is specially important in children's books, since, as any parent or teacher will know all too well, children much prefer arriving to travelling. The notion of a ramble through the countryside which doesn't go from place A to place B is anathema to most children, unless they already think they're in some special place. Now if we take a simple story, such as Helen Oxenbury's The Great Big Enormous Turnip (1968), we can see how aspects of language in the discourse underline the promise of arrival. The trick is a balance between sameness and difference. The story begins: Once upon a time an old man planted a little turnip, and said, "Grow, grow, little turnip, grow sweet. Grow, grow, little turnip, grow strong." In this short stretch "little turnip" appears three times, and "grow" appears six; in the two sentences which the man speaks, the only difference is the contrastive pair, "sweet/strong." The repetitions make this cohesive, as does the semantic link between "planted" and "grow," and that contrast between "sweet" and "strong." On the next page, And the turnip grew up sweet and strong, and big and enormous. Again it's repetition and difference: the change from "grow" to "grew up," the repetition of "sweet and strong," now coupled, and the addition of the size-terms "big and enormous." From here on, the story proceeds in this way—the man tries to pull it up, and can't, and so has to go on accumulating helpers, first his wife, who, when they don't succeed, then fetches their granddaughter, who fetches the dog, who fetches the cat, who fetches the mouse, each time the same formula of pulling and failing is repeated, except with one more component added, and incidentally, the helpers get progressively smaller, so that when the mouse is added, the turnip finally comes out. This is a most gratifying story for a small child, since it seems to imply that the smallest member of a group or family is the one who makes all the difference. The important point about the story's language is that the structure of the story and the structure of the language—repetition with difference—reflect one another. Kemper's study on the development of narrative skills in children concluded that "the development of plot and causal structure in children's stories parallels the...