How Preschoolers Learn to Tell Stories: Six Language Clues From Wordless Picture Books

The six measures, in plain English

The six indicators are best understood as measurement lenses rather than six separate abilities a child either has or lacks.

That is the strength of this kind of analysis: a picture-book storytelling moment, which can otherwise feel subjective, becomes language data that can be compared across time points.

The main finding: growth, but not a straight line

Overall, most of the six basic language measures increased with age. In other words, from ages 3 to 5, children’s wordless picture-book narration tended to become more mature in output, utterance length and vocabulary use.

But the study also pushes back against a too-simple story of constant upward progress. Mean length of utterance, corrected type-token ratio and lexical diversity showed downward adjustment at some age stages. So the careful conclusion is not “every measure rises smoothly.” It is that most measures tend to grow with age, while some aspects of storytelling language can fluctuate along the way.

The researchers also found that, after controlling for age, mean length of utterance, total words, different words and lexical diversity were significantly positively correlated. In this sample, those measures were not isolated from one another; together, they reflected part of children’s narrative language performance.

Why use wordless picture books?

In a wordless picture-book task, children are not reading a printed script aloud. They have to use the pictures as prompts and build a spoken story from what they notice. In the 2019 study, that made wordless picture books a way to collect oral narrative samples from young children.

Other research helps explain why this kind of material is useful. A study of kindergarten children reading wordless picture books found that children noticed visual elements such as colour, line, shape and body movement, and could offer multiple interpretations that followed the story sequence.

A separate study of children aged 3, 5 and 6 also used wordless picture books to collect storytelling language samples, then analysed parts of speech, high-frequency words and new vocabulary. It found that, except for numerals and particles, most word classes increased with age, with nouns, verbs and adverbs increasing the most.

Taken together, these studies support wordless picture books as a useful research prompt for observing how children connect visual information with spoken narration. They do not show that the books, by themselves, cause language growth.

Put the six indicators in context

The six measures are useful, but they are not the whole of language development. A child-language resource describes language as involving form, content and use, and points to areas such as communication/pragmatics, speech/phonology, semantics/morphology and grammar/narrative when observing children’s development.

That broader frame matters. Word counts, utterance length and vocabulary diversity can tell us a great deal about narrative language, but they do not replace a full view of how a child communicates, understands, uses sounds, builds meaning and participates in conversation.

What not to overread

First, the study followed 28 children, so its results should not be treated as a fixed developmental curve for every child.

Second, the findings should not be simplified into “all six language measures steadily increased.” The study specifically reported downward movement in mean length of utterance, corrected type-token ratio and lexical diversity at some stages.

Third, this was not a teaching-intervention experiment. It examined age-related development and correlations in storytelling measures, so it should not be read as proof that wordless picture books caused children’s language abilities to improve.

Bottom line

The strongest reading of the evidence is that preschool storytelling grows in several measurable ways, but unevenly. From ages 3 to 5, children’s wordless picture-book narrations generally show gains in basic language measures, while sentence length and vocabulary diversity may not move upward at every single stage.

For anyone studying or observing early language, that is the key lesson: look beyond whether a child “talks more.” Storytelling development is multidimensional, and output, utterance length and vocabulary variation do not always mature in perfect lockstep.