This thesis presents the first extended Text World Theory (cf. Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) account of pre-school storytime discourse. In doing so, it combines ethnographic methods of data collection with the text-world analytical framework and examines naturalistic video data of parent-child dyads participating in routine storytime practices at home. The project has three central aims: to investigate how naturally occurring read-aloud activities between an adult and young child operate; to extend the use and capabilities of Text World Theory by applying it to storytime discourse; and to provide insight into the pre-schooler's early experiences of fiction. The cognitive-linguistic analysis of some of children's very earliest interactions with literary texts offered in this thesis provides a unique insight into storytime practices and the early cognition of reading. As a result, the thesis makes a number of original contributions to the fields of literacy and education research, picturebook scholarship, and cognitive stylistics. In the first and second instances, the analyses presented throughout this work provide a holistic account of early reading activities that extend existing research on pre-school reading and pre-school readers from both an experiential and ontological perspective. Furthermore, I offer an original contribution to cognitive stylistics in the form of my application and development of the Text World Theory framework. Throughout this study, I demonstrate the suitability of Text World Theory to a context-sensitive examination of the experiences of young readers and the exploration of the storytime practices that introduce them to written fiction.