| Summary: | Picture book is a popular resource used among children in many educational situations. Teachers and parents use picture books to cultivate children’s literacy ability, aesthetic ability and help them to know about the world and themselves. Yet little is known about the relationships between picture book, reading comprehension, information acquisition, and vocabulary learning. This study examined whether picture book reading can help children understand story and infer the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary. On the basis of the experiential meaning analysis using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) models, this study further examined whether children acquired three types of information: actions, participants and circumstance differently. The experiment was conducted in a Chinese public primary school with Grade 5 children, and 97 valid data was collected. Followed by the experiment, I also conducted guided think-aloud interviews to qualitatively examine the role of picture books in vocabulary meaning inference. The experimental results showed that the picture book (PB) group did not perform significantly better than the other two groups only receiving pictures or text, but participants in the PB group performed significantly better in answering the picture-version questions than the text-version questions, suggesting that picture information might be easier for children to acquire. For the information types, action information was the hardest type for all children to obtain, and the participant information was the most accessible one for the picture book group. Finally, the interview revealed that picture books could help children infer the meaning of unknown words. During the inference, children would use various types of information as references, including text, picture and context information provided by the book, prior world knowledge and prior linguistic knowledge. The interview also noted that low-level learners tend to use more picture references than text references.
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