Abstract
Picture books play an important role as a material that develops children's linguistic competence. Thus, English picture books can be considered to be indispensable in the children’s English study. In this paper, metrical characteristics of some English picture books were investigated, compared with English textbooks for Japanese junior high schools. In short, frequency characteristics of character- and word-appearance were investigated. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore, the percentage of Japanese junior high school required vocabulary and American basic vocabulary was calculated to obtain the difficulty-level. As a result, it was clearly shown that the English picture books have a similar tendency to literary writings in the characteristics of character-appearance, and some books are more difficult than English textbooks.
