Story power! The impact of children's literature

Melissa Beattie-Moss

Dan Hade

"We think in stories," exclaimed Dan Hade, Penn State professor of language and literacy. "They are incredibly powerful in the lives of all humans—especially children."

Last Wednesday, Hade presented "Story power! The impact of children's literature" as the third installment of Research Unplugged's spring lineup. He opened the talk with an anecdote from his days as a kindergarten teacher. "I told the class the story of "The Three Little Pigs," said Hade. "Most children know a gentler version of the story, but in the version I told the last little pig boils and eats the wolf in vengeance."

Hade described how one wide-eyed little girl sitting at his feet looked up and said, "You know, I've never had wolf, but I hear it's pretty good." The audience laughed, as Hade went on to say that there was "no doubt that the story had gotten into her mind and ... she was totally convinced that she knew what boiled wolf smelled like and tasted like." That, said Hade, is but one example of the very real power of stories to capture young imaginations.

The former elementary school librarian discussed how children's literature has changed—perhaps not always for the better—in the past thirty years, and described four emerging trends in the genre: graphic novels, branding, globalization, and consolidation. According to Hade, "Children's literature is the only class of literature not produced by those who read it." This fact gives authors and publishers an extra measure of power and responsibility over the content they produce, he noted.

A particular problem, Hade said, is that nearly 80 percent of children's books are published by only eight companies. Today's trend is for publishing companies to be purchased by global media giants such as Viacom and Disney, he explained. These corporations play an enormous role in deciding which children's books will meet commercial success and which ones will never have a chance and end up being sold off cheaply as remainders. Noted Hade, this consolidation of power can be harmful to the development of children, as fewer voices are heard.

The rise of large bookstore chains such as Barnes and Noble has also pushed buying power out of the hands of small bookstores devoted to children's literature. At these niche stores, Hade said, children's book experts stocked the shelves and offered parents a carefully chosen selection. By contrast, in today's large chains, "there is typically no one with literary expertise in the store."

Large publishing companies selling to large corporate bookstores are looking for "books that are guaranteed to sell themselves," Hade explained. "Brand-name books and characters do just that." Clifford the Big Red Dog, Harry Potter, and The Magic School Bus, are universally familiar. "I think of these as books," Hade said. "But they have evolved into their own brands. They can now be toys, t-shirts, even toothbrushes."

The commercialization of children's literature "changes the way we react to the story," he continued. "Children's books exist, in part, for someone to make a profit. They're commodities."

It is profit that has pushed children's literature in new directions—one of the more controversial being the sub-genre of graphic novels."Companies have begun to look at what kids actually spend their time reading," Hade pointed out. Because of this, many book companies have increased sales of graphic novels and have re-released chapter books from previous generations like the Goosebumps and Babysitter's Club series into comic book format.

Hade's discussion of graphic novels brought up questions about how the pervasiveness of video and the Internet may impact young readers. These technologies can affect children's ability to process information, as a written or oral story is experienced differently from a television show or a movie, he said. "The medium matters. It changes the way we relate to the story."

"The Web accelerates everything," Hade noted. "Kids want their information faster and aren't as likely to sit down and read a book when they can get a story from a fifteen-second commercial."

Though Hade admitted that skills are required to read comic books, play video games, and watch videos, these skills are "not what we typically measure in school," he said.

Easy access to technology and a heavy dependence on graphics, he added, are creating "children who find it more difficult to visualize." Warned Hade, kids today are losing imagination—the "ability to visualize what isn't"—because of their dependency on technology.

Whatever the medium, he urged at last, we need to retain the centrality of imaginative story-telling in our culture. "Stories are our main way of making sense of ourselves and the world. That's why they are so important."

Dan Hade, Ph.D., is associate professor of language and literacy education in the College of Education. He can be reached at ddh2@psu.edu.

Particular features of picture books, such as the specific content they incorporate, or the way in which the content is presented, may influence children's tendency to learn and transfer the educational content to real-world situations. Below we review studies that investigate some of these features, organized by the domain in which the educational content is presented. We have chosen this organization because particular features may be more influential in some learning domains than others. For example, visual features may be important when learning vocabulary, where children may be fairly successful at transfer on the basis of matching up perceptual features of objects. However, contextual information may be more important in science domains where transfer often takes place on a conceptual level. The domains we have chosen are primarily the domains in which the impact of picture book features on transfer of information presented in books have been studied. In each section, we address the book features that have been studied in that domain, interpreted with regard to our three developmental factors. Future work is needed to address how book features influence transfer in other domains such as math and the arts, as well as how additional book features impact transfer.

Picture books are a rich source of new language. Because infants and toddlers are just learning to use pictures symbolically to refer to other objects, features that support this insight rather than distract from it are most supportive. If the goal is to teach children new words or letters, it appears that books with realistic images are best, especially with the youngest children. If books with manipulative features are selected, they should draw attention to the educational content rather than distract from it. More research is needed to determine the influence of realistic versus fantastical contexts on children's transfer of new words they have learned to other contexts, as well as how these contexts interact with children's developing abilities to distinguish fantasy and reality. Future research could consider not only the variety of picture arrangements on a page (Flack and Horst, 2017 ) but also the type of backgrounds that pictures are displayed on and the type of object arrangements (whether an object is displayed with objects from the same category or a different category). An insightful analysis of the structure of children's books for children aged 0 and 3 was provided by Kummerling-Meibauer and Meibauer ( 2011 ) and future research could use it as a guideline to experimentally test what types of book structures are most inducive to young children's word and letter learning.

In picture books both fantastical and realistic, children may encounter new and unusual vocabulary. However, we might predict that realistic story contexts provide more cues to children that they can use to match story depictions and contexts with real-world situations. The similarity between the learning and transfer contexts can provide support for symbolic insight—recognizing the similarity between a symbol and its referent—as well as for analogical transfer. A recent intervention with low-income preschoolers investigated the effect of fantastical or realistic content on children's word learning (Weisberg et al., 2015 ). Children were presented with a set of realistic or fantastical commercial picture books and toys. The researchers measured children's comprehension of the vocabulary presented in the books and toys receptively and asked them to tell everything they knew about the tested word (e.g., “What are weeds?”). Across both conditions, children showed similar gains in identifying the tested objects. However, children in the fantastical condition were able to provide more information about the objects when given open-ended prompts. This study suggests that children learned more about the target objects in the fantastical contexts. Importantly, however, this study did not assess any type of transfer to the real world, and no distinction was made between fantastical and realistic information in explanations given by children. How fantasy may influence children's ability to transfer labels to new exemplars or real-world referents remains to be investigated. Consideration of the developmental factors we identified here—symbolic insight, analogical transfer, and reasoning about fantasy and reality—would lead one to predict that children will have more difficulty transferring labels from fantastical than realistic books to real-world referents.

For both word and letter learning, the manipulative features traditionally found in print books do not appear to facilitate learning and transfer, and in cases when the features are irrelevant to the book's educational content, may even interfere with it. Content-central manipulatives that highlight educational content, such as highlighting the visual shape of a letter—the crucial component for transferring the letter name to new instances of the letter—may hold promise in facilitating symbolic insight, and thus transfer. Research in this area will become especially crucial as the features available in digital books continue to expand.

Research shows that not all manipulative features are detrimental to children's learning. Multimedia researchers have argued that extra book features that engage children with the educational content of books (called “considerate,” Labbo and Kuhn, 2000 ) can support learning. A recent meta-analysis of studies involving electronic books with considerate enhancements like animated pictures, music, and sound effects were supportive of vocabulary learning for preschool and elementary children (Takacs et al., 2015 ). While we know of no similar results with manipulative features of print books, one study suggests that manipulatives designed to draw attention to the educational content, in this case the shape of letters, did not distract 3-year-olds from learning the letter names (Chiong and DeLoache, 2012 ).

Another possibility is that children's mental effort is engaged with interaction with the features rather than attending to the content. For example, pulling a tab in an alphabet book to make a truck move does not help to emphasize the correspondence between the letter T and the first sound in the word “truck.” There is other evidence that features that require additional mental effort, like having multiple large pictures on each page, can result in cognitive overload, disrupting learning (Flack and Horst, 2017 ). Flack and Horst ( 2017 ) read 3- to 5-year-olds books with one or two regular-sized illustrations per page spread or one large image per spread. New objects in the pictures were labeled with new words during reading. At test, children were asked to identify the referent of the labels by pointing to the correct objects on a book page. Children were more successful when they had seen one illustration, regardless of size, indicating that two illustrations may have resulted in cognitive overload. The researchers did not assess transfer of learning. In a follow-up study, a hand gesture that directed children to the correct illustration supported learning from the book with two pictures per spread. In light of these effects of cognitive overload on children's learning, more research is needed to determine whether manipulatives are particularly disruptive of symbolic insight, whether they result in cognitive overload, or both.

Using books designed to teach children animal names, Tare et al. ( 2010 ) tested the helping or hindering influence of manipulative features on 18- to 22-month-olds' learning and transfer of the animal names. Children were read a book by a researcher featuring 9 animals either using a commercially presented manipulative book (with flaps and pull tabs) or a scanned copy of the book (without manipulative features). At test, children who had seen a copy of the book without manipulatives correctly generalized a new animal name to new pictures and a replica of the animal. Children who read the book with manipulative features did not perform above chance. In another study, researchers compared 30- to 36-month-olds' learning of letters from a manipulative alphabet book with pulls, flaps and textures to a book without these features (Chiong and DeLoache, 2012 ). Children learned more letters from the simple alphabet book than the manipulative one. The authors argued that the salience of manipulative features may render them more like objects themselves and less like symbols that stand for other objects than their 2D counterparts. Children's difficulty transferring labels from manipulative books may therefore stem from a difficulty in “seeing past” the fancy features to realize that the content is representational, meaningful, and applicable to other contexts.

The term “manipulative features” has been used to refer to features that are “designed to increase children's physical interaction with [a] book,” like lift-a-flap, scratch-and-sniff, and other three-dimensional add-ons (Tare et al., 2010 , p. 396). These features may be entertaining for children, but research suggests they may not be optimal for learning. One reason they may not be optimal for learning is that they may draw attention away from links between the book and the real world. For young children who are still learning to use pictures in books as “standing for” real objects, this may distract from the insight necessary for transfer of learned information.

As infants reach the middle of their second year, they begin to treat pictures referentially, by pointing and labeling the depicted objects (DeLoache et al., 1998 ). Research also indicates that in their second year of life children understand the representational status of pictures (Preissler and Carey, 2004 ; Ganea et al., 2009 ). Yet, children's transfer of novel words from picture books to the real world referent can be impacted by pictorial realism at these ages. Ganea et al. ( 2008 ) showed 15- and 18-month-olds picture books presenting both familiar and novel objects in the form of photographs, realistic color drawings that closely resembled the photographs, or color cartoons which were less detailed and more distorted in appearance. After being read the book by a researcher (told the names for the pictured objects), children of both ages were able to recognize the labeled object they had seen in the book regardless of the type of image. However, children who were read the cartoon book did not generalize to a picture of a new exemplar different in color. Eighteen-month-olds transferred the label to its physical real-word referent across all three conditions, but 15-month-olds did so only in the photograph and drawing conditions. Taken together, these findings suggest that transfer from the photographs was easiest for children, and transfer from cartoons the most difficult. With age, children get better at transferring from perceptually dissimilar depictions to real objects, although there is evidence that the iconicity of pictures continues to play a role in some picture transfer tasks even at 3 years of age (Callaghan, 2000 ; Mareovich and Peralta, 2015 ). The impact of iconicity on young children's learning from picture books has also been found with other measures, such as imitation (Simcock and DeLoache, 2006 ). Thus, at young ages, when children are first beginning to think symbolically, their understanding that pictures stand for real objects interacts with the type of depictions in books.

Newborn infants perceive and distinguish the dimensional nature of pictures from real objects. If presented with a complex object and a photograph of it, they clearly prefer the real object (Slater et al., 1984 ). However, when presented with photographs alone, 9-month-olds interact with them in ways similar to how they would interact with the real object they represent—by hitting, rubbing, and grasping the photographs (Pierroutsakos and DeLoache, 2003 ). Their behavior suggests they have not yet grasped the symbolic function of pictures.

Picture books vary in the degree to which their pictures represent reality, from photographs to illustrations to cartoonish line drawings. An image that is highly iconic, or visually very similar to its referent, may highlight the relation between the picture book image and real-world instances. As such, we might predict photographs to be the most supportive of children's transfer of knowledge from books to reality.

Picture books expose children to rich language. For example, picture books contain a richer diversity of words (Montag et al., 2015 ) and a greater incidence of rare grammatical constructions (Cameron-Faulkner and Noble, 2013 ) than child-directed speech. In addition, caregivers use a larger number and wider variety of words during reading than other activities (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991 ). It is not surprising, then, that joint reading has been associated with a variety of later language outcomes, including vocabulary growth and early literacy skills like letter knowledge (e.g., Bus et al., 1995 ). Here we are interested in particular features of books that may support the process of language learning from picture books on a less protracted scale—words and letters learned from individual reading sessions. We expect that symbolic understanding plays an especially important role in this domain, as transfer of a new word to a new context heavily depends on recognition of the labeled item in the book as representing objects in the real world to which the label also applies (Preissler and Carey, 2004 ; Ganea et al., 2008 , 2009 ). Thus, features of books that make the link between depicted objects and real world referents clearer or easier to discern should support transfer, whereas features of books that make these links more difficult to recognize may make transfer more difficult. The book features that have been most studied in this domain include pictorial realism, manipulative features, and fantastical contexts.

Learning biological facts and concepts

Children's learning about non-human animals has been the focus of most studies of children's biology learning from picture books. Children are naturally interested in animals from a young age (DeLoache et al., 2011) and animals feature heavily in books designed for young children (Marriott, 2002). Thus, this domain for learning involves the largest amount of research on the impact of picture book features on transfer. A subset of studies has investigated biological concepts that apply to humans and non-human animals alike, including nutrition (Gripshover and Markman, 2013) and adaptation by natural selection (Kelemen et al., 2014). Another, reviewed here, focused on teaching children a novel biological causal relationship (Walker et al., 2014).

As is the case when learning the correspondence between words and letters and their referents, symbolic understanding can also play an important role in learning and transfer of biological facts and concepts. However, transfer of conceptual knowledge requires more than just symbolically matching a picture with its real-world referent; it often involves more complex reasoning about similarities between situations and selection of the correct details for transfer. Therefore analogical reasoning and discrimination between fantasy and reality should play a much more central role in young children's learning of biological information from picture books than it did for word and letter learning. The book features that have been studied in this domain include manipulative features, fantastical contexts, anthropomorphism, and genre.

Manipulative features

Concerns about the use of manipulative features in biology learning mirror those for word learning. When children are learning to symbolically link picture books and the real world, distracting features in books may disrupt that link. In one study with 27- to 39-month-olds, children were read either a pop-up book, a book with realistic images, or a book with drawings (Tare et al., 2010, Study 2). During book sharing, the experimenter told the child four facts about the dietary preferences of animals depicted in the books (e.g., chicks like to eat worms). Children who were read the pop-up book learned fewer facts from the book than children who were read the books without pop-up features. This study did not assess transfer of those facts to new contexts, but demonstrates that features that distract from or obscure the basic correspondence between pictures and their referent operate to decrease learning in the biological domain, as with word and letter learning.

Fantastical contexts

Although fantasy may be a much-loved and engaging genre, what do the violations of reality inherent to this genre mean for children's learning and transfer? Fantastical books may vary widely by mixing characters, settings, and events that vary in their realistic nature. Books with fantastical aspects could be an especially good choice for young children because they may engage children in imaginative thinking. Imaginative play may facilitate better causal reasoning (Walker and Gopnik, 2013), better deductive reasoning (Dias and Harris, 1988), and increased empathy for and understanding of others (Mar and Oatley, 2008). Parker and Lepper (1992) suggest that fantasy contexts may also be highly educational because they are engaging and motivating for children (see also Hopkins and Weisberg, 2017). However, fantastical contexts may make it more difficult for children to see links between books and reality, whether symbolically or analogically. Fantastical contexts may also make it more difficult for children to identify what information in books is real and should be transferred.

In a study of children's causal learning from realistic versus fantastical picture books, Walker et al. (2014) presented 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds with one of two fictional picture books and tested their generalization of a fictional target biological causal relation: Popple Flowers cause hiccups when one sniffs them. The target relation was couched in either a realistic world (e.g., a boy climbs a tree) or a fantastical world (e.g., a boy has a conversation with a tree). In both books, the boy sniffs a popple flower and gets hiccups. Children were then asked to judge whether events in the story “could really happen” or “cannot really happen, and are just pretend.” Next, children were told by the experimenter that she smelled a Popple Flower earlier and asked whether they thought she did or did not get hiccups. When the fictional story world was more realistic, children were more likely to judge the target relation as something that “could really happen” and to predict that the experimenter got hiccups from smelling the flower herself. The tendency to transfer the target information from the more fantastical world decreased with age, as children's ability to distinguish fantasy and reality matured. This study indicates that when children are asked to transfer information from the story to a supposed real-world situation (a real person sniffing a Popple Flower) they rely on contextual information presented in the story to reason about whether the information should be transferred or not. In the case of the fantastical story, the context of the story world and the real world were less similar than in the case of the realistic story, thus decreasing the chance of analogical transfer. Also, as noted before, when children are uncertain about the fantastical status of information, they tend to be skeptical, erring on the side of caution when determining what is real. Fantastical contexts may cue children that information in the story is irrelevant to their situation and thus decrease their tendency to apply the information to realistic contexts.

Anthropomorphism

In an analysis of 1,064 modern picture books, Marriott (2002) concluded that picture books typically present the animal kingdom and its natural environment in an inaccurate and misleading manner, including a tendency toward anthropomorphism. Providing animals with habitats and traits that are realistic for humans may be an especially difficult type of fantasy for children to recognize, as these features may fit comfortably with their own personal experiences of the world. For example, it may seem plausible that animals would cry when sad or sleep with a blanket because those are part of children's everyday lives. Recent evidence demonstrates that children may struggle to distinguish between the anthropomorphic characteristics portrayed in stories and the real characteristics of animals. This struggle could influence the information that children transfer from stories to the real world.

In one study, Ganea et al. (2014) created two types of picture books about novel animals: one with factual language and another with anthropomorphic language. Both book types contained realistic images, and provided facts about each target animal. Across both book types, 3- to 5-year-olds who were read the books by a researcher learned the target facts presented in the picture books. Importantly, however, children who heard anthropomorphic stories about novel animals more often attributed anthropomorphic characteristics (e.g., feeling proud, having friends) to real animals in photographs than did those who heard the stories with no anthropomorphic language. Thus, children sometimes incorrectly transferred anthropomorphic attributes to real animals.

In a second study, Ganea et al. (2014) investigated the impact of anthropomorphic images on children's fact learning and tendency to anthropomorphize. They presented a new group of 3- and 5-year-old children with books about novel animals that contained either factual or anthropomorphic language. In this case, both book types included anthropomorphic illustrations (e.g., animals eating at a dinner table). Children in the full anthropomorphic condition (anthropomorphic images + language) answered fewer factual questions correctly than children in the anthropomorphic images only condition (with factual language). Children in the full anthropomorphic condition also attributed more anthropomorphic characteristics to real animals. These findings suggest anthropomorphic language may be particularly confusing for children.

Using storybooks with subtler forms of anthropomorphism, Geerdts et al. (2015) investigated the effects of anthropomorphism on 3- to 6-year-old children's learning about camouflage. In their anthropomorphic books, animals were portrayed with human-like faces and postures, but in their natural environment. Children read a picture book with either factual or anthropomorphized language, combined with either realistic or these subtler anthropomorphic pictures. In general, transfer was low—only a group of boys exposed to the book with the anthropomorphic pictures transferred information about camouflage to realistic situations at test, and there were no condition differences in the psychological properties children attributed to animals. The study had only 12 children per condition, so limited conclusions can be drawn about the lack of condition effects. Future research will need to address whether the style of anthropomorphic depictions has an impact on what children learn and transfer from stories.

Another recent study offers insights into how anthropomorphic depictions influence children's biological reasoning and learning. Waxman et al. (2014) told 5-year-olds a novel fact either about dogs or about humans (i.e., “Dogs/Humans have andro inside them.”). They then read children a few pages from an anthropomorphic book (Berenstain Bears) or a realistic book (an animal encyclopedia entry). After the realistic book children reasoned that bears had andro regardless of whether they had been told the fact about humans or dogs. After the anthropomorphic book, children reasoned that bears had andro only if they had been told the fact about humans. This study suggests that anthropomorphic portrayals may lead children to think of those animals as more human-like, and even a very brief exposure to depictions of animals in picture books (whether anthropomorphic or realistic) can influence the way they reason about non-human animals as having human traits.

Children's anthropocentric biases may also interact with the format of the books in which they encounter novel animals. We know that children from rural communities, who likely had more experience with nature, are less like to take an anthropocentric perspective than urban children (Waxman and Medin, 2007), perhaps because they have more first-hand experience that allows them to accurately identify anthropomorphic portrayals as fantastical. On the other hand, urban children who lack first-hand experience with a variety of animals may instead have anthropomorphic reasoning reinforced through other sources, such as media depictions (e.g., picture books) and conversations (Herrmann et al., 2010). These different anthropocentric biases may affect the extent to which children transfer information they encounter in a fantastical book about animals, with rural children less likely to transfer anthropomorphic information and urban children more so. Anthropomorphic depictions of animals in picture books may in turn increase children's tendency to consider animals as human-like, especially for children who have limited first-hand experience with other species. As researchers work to follow up the potentially positive roles that anthropomorphic characters may play, parents and teachers can work to dispel biological misconceptions by talking with their children about which characteristics are real and which are not (McCrindle and Odendaal, 1994; Marriott, 2002; Gebhard et al., 2003). Thus, supporting children's fantasy-reality distinction through discussion can support children who have not fully developed this ability to appropriately learn and apply information from books to the real world.

Genre

Children may also use book genre as a cue to determine whether information should be transferred to new contexts or is applicable only to story worlds. Children's books can be divided broadly into fiction (generally narratives) and non-fiction (informational, generally non-narrative) genres. Informational texts are realistic non-fiction books that are designed to convey information about the natural and social worlds (Duke, 2000). Informational books play an important role in classrooms; imagine learning organic chemistry or algebra without a textbook! Despite their prevalence in advanced classrooms, informational texts are rare in early childhood and early elementary classrooms (Pressley et al., 1996; Duke, 2000). Although sales in the informational book genre have grown in recent years, sales for children's fiction remain approximately four times higher (Milliot, 2015). The traditional absence of information books from early childhood contexts may be the result of a widely held assumption that narrative is the more effective genre for engaging children (Donovan and Smolkin, 2001; Duke et al., 2003; Mantzicopoulos and Patrick, 2011). However, a recent study found that preschoolers actually preferred information books over fictional ones, and teachers found the content more transferrable to real life (Kotaman and Tekin, 2017).

One hallmark of informational books is that they contain more generic language than narrative books (Gelman et al., 2012). Laboratory studies have shown that 3- and 4-year-olds are sensitive to differences in language and extend properties to larger categories when they hear generic language (Cimpian and Markman, 2008). Due to the differences in style of language used by the books, we might expect children to more readily transfer information from informational books. For example, a narrative book about cavies might contain the statement, “Dave the cavie eats fruit,” whereas an informational book might state, “Cavies eat fruit.” Based on Cimpian and Markman's (2008) findings we might predict that the generic nature of the second statement could act as a cue that all cavies eat fruit, rather than the specific cavie named Dave. However, it may be the case that children's generalization is robust to differences in genre and language specificity when the type of content applies at the category level (e.g., about diet). When mothers share picture books with children they provide both generic and specific language when offering natural facts about animals, suggesting generalizable facts are not consistently in generic language (Nyhout and O'Neill, 2014).

No studies have addressed learning biological information from non-narrative information versus narrative fiction specifically; however, one study compared two books where some of the language differed in specificity. Three- and four-year-olds were read one of two narrative picture books designed to teach the concept of color camouflage (Ganea et al., 2011). The factual book contained a combination of general statements about frogs interspersed with a narrative about a specific bird and frog called “the bird” and “the frog.” In the intentional book, the frog was named “Sammy” and generic statements about frogs were replaced with specific statements about Sammy. The intentional book also included statements anthropomorphizing the intentions of the animals, e.g., “Sammy tricked the bird.” Three- and four-year-olds successfully transferred information about camouflage to novel situations presented using photos of frogs and other animals regardless of which book they read. Four-year-olds also transferred to live animals in tanks. The study shows that children can transfer biological information from books to the real world when both types of language are used. Further research will be needed to establish whether generic language used in books provides a cue to children about transfer, as one may expect from other research, and whether other genre-related book features influence children's learning.

Summary: picture books and biology learning

Differences in book features appear to have significant effects on children's ability to extract and transfer biological information to the real world. Fantastical contexts used in stories may cue children that information presented in books is not transferrable to real-world contexts. Because children tend to err on the side of caution when reasoning about what events could really happen, children may fail to apply accurate biological information presented in fantastical stories, dismissing it as unrealistic. In contrast, anthropomorphic details in stories appear to push children's reasoning in the opposite direction—influencing children to reason about animals as similar to humans and potentially motivating them to accept inaccurate biological information about animals. This may be mediated by experience; children without extensive experience with animals may use their own personal (human) experience to help them distinguish what is realistic. Adults may help to dispel misconceptions about animals by talking with children about the characteristics portrayed in stories. In either case, realistic books may more readily support analogical transfer by portraying contexts similar to the real world and characteristics that are appropriate for transfer.

Finally, book genre has the potential to support transfer via its use of stylistic features such as language and image type. More research is needed to determine the extent to which the specificity of language used or other genre-related features support children's acquisition of biological information from picture books. Contexts that more clearly resemble reality may support both the symbolic insight needed for learning in transfer in children's early acquisition of biological facts from books (e.g., chicks eat worms) and the analogical reasoning needed for later acquisition of scientific concepts (e.g., camouflage).