Examining the characters in illustrated children's books in terms of appropriateness to children's humorous development

This study is in the most preferred picture books in the preschool category, which are sold online. It was carried out in order to examine the appropriateness of the characters in the humorous development of children. The universe of the research is composed of children's picture books that are sold online. The sample of the study consists of the first 100 illustrated children's books excluding the most preferred science, series and activity books in the preschool category, which were sold online on 23 November 2020. The data in the study was collected with the "Humorous Elements in Illustrated Children's Books Examination Form" created by Johnson (2010) and adapted into Turkish by Akıncı (2015). The form examines the humorous elements in picture children's books in three different categories of humorous elements: visual humorous elements, situational humorous elements and verbal humorous elements. Since this study aims to examine the characters in picture children's books, the characters were examined in terms of visual humorous and situational humorous elements categories. In the study, one of the qualitative method models, the case study model was used. The data obtained as a result of the research were analyzed in the MAXQDA program. Sub-codes were created in order to examine in more detail which type of humor the 25 humorous elements within the scope of visual and situational humorous elements use in the characters. A total of 23.097 pieces of data were encoded. As a result of the analysis, it was observed that the characters in the illustrated children's books include visual humorous elements rather than situational humorous elements. Key Words: Child Development, Children's Literature, Illustrated Children's Books, Humor, Character