Cognitive Development
Cognitive development is intertwined with the maturity of the child and is influenced by the experiences offered by his social environment. Children's books can help the child to understand basic concepts and develop his thinking. Children's Literature, moreover, is effective in shaping important functions related to thought, such as observation, comparison, categorization, hypothesis, organization, summary, application, and critique (Norton, 2007).
Children's books, with rich and colorful illustrations, are ideal for the exercise of observation, in young and old children. Literary books can be used to develop the ability of comparison. The comparison can be focused between two or more books, which present the same subject, in order to motivate the child to compare the external appearance of the book, the way each author presents the story, the illustration, the style, the language. and other elements. The comparison may also involve the approach of a story from different translations or adaptations, but also from variations of the story itself, encouraging the child to identify similarities and differences between them.
Books that refer to concepts are a stimulus for practicing classification and categorization. Some books help the younger child to understand the relationship between objects and concepts, such as color, shape, size. The classification can also refer to the characteristics of a story, about the main characters, the scenes, the elements of the narrative and the plot. Older children can classify books, either according to a given classification system, under the guidance of an adult, or by creating their own system, with criteria and categories, based on the content of the material they want to classify (Karpozilou, 1994).
Reading and listening to a literary work can develop and improve a child's organizational skills. His ability to place events in a logical order of causation but also in chronological order is cultivated by reading books, and especially traditional stories, which have a coherent plot and are based on repetition and description. After all, reading extends the reader's experience in space and time and helps him to gain a sense of time periods and evolution (Spink, 1990).