AN INNOVATIVE DESIGN FRAMEWORK FOR CHINESE CHILDREN'S PICTURE BOOKS BASED ON PRESCHOOL CHILDREN'S COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Preschool children can only benefit from illustrations in a picture book if they do not have to make too many perceptual or lexical movements to recognize the depicted objects. However, age-normed evidence is seldom employed to select illustrations to be retained, simplified, scaffolded, or replaced in Chinese picture book design. The study is based on a secondary analysis of public norms obtained from 260 object pictures rated by 1st and 3rd grade children, to create an age-sensitive design framework. The data consisted of 66 Mandarin children (520 age–item observations). The following methods were used: paired comparisons, bootstrap confidence intervals, age-specific Spearman correlations, fractional-logit generalized estimating equations clustered by picture, and principal component analysis. Relative to K1 norms, K3 norms showed higher expected-name agreement (mean difference = 0.079, 95% CI [0.064, 0.094]), greater familiarity (0.279, [0.228, 0.329]), and lower perceived complexity (−0.393, [−0.431, −0.356]). The K3 advantage was still significant in the complete pair model, and the objective age of acquisition was strongly negatively correlated with agreement, whereas lexical frequency correlated positively with it. The Developmental Illustration Accessibility Index (DIAI) combined four factors: agreement, lexical consensus, familiarity, and complexity to produce four design actions: direct use, visual simplification, contextual scaffolding, and redesign. The framework provides a replicable link between developmental evidence and illustration decisions and calls for prospective testing in the full range of picture books in the Chinese context in preschool learners and for a wide variety of genres.