Is There a Thought in Silence? Wordless Picturebooks and Critical Thinking in Young Children

Wordless picturebooks have attracted growing interest for their potential to support children’s imagination, visual literacy, and narrative development. However, how these books contribute to the emergence of thinking skills in early childhood remains underexplored. Grounded in a critical thinking framework, this qualitative case study examines how young children engage in critical thinking through interactions with wordless picturebooks. The study was conducted over 11 weeks with 18 children aged 60–72 months in a public preschool classroom in Istanbul. Sixteen wordless picturebooks were explored through structured dialogic reading sessions. Data were collected via video recordings and anecdotal field notes. Analysis was guided by a six-dimensional critical thinking framework comprising interpretation, inference, analysis, evaluation, explanation, and self-regulation. Children’s responses reflected a broad range of thinking processes. The analysis revealed that children interpreted emotions and events using their own words (interpretation), identified causal links and connections within visual narratives (analysis), predicted outcomes and imagined unseen but plausible story elements (inference), and evaluated character behavior by questioning the logic and plausibility of events (evaluation). More selectively, children articulated broader messages or lessons derived from narrative outcomes (explanation) and, in some instances, revised their own ideas in response to peer dialogue and evolving story cues (self-regulation). These findings illustrate the multifaceted nature of early thinking skills in visually mediated, collaborative storytelling contexts. As an emerging area of research, this study offers empirical evidence for the pedagogical value of wordless picturebooks in fostering critical thinking skills in early childhood.