Effects of Television Preplay Formats on Children’s Attention and Story Comprehension

Children’s visual attention to, and comprehension of, a television progmm was measured OS 0 function of inserts called preplays that varied on two orthogonal dimensions: (1) Presence or absence of visual excerpts from the pragmm, and (2) concrete or inferential story narration. visual fixation was coded continuously for 64 pairs of same-sex children, in 1st through 4th gmdes, while they viewed the television progmm with one of four types of preplays. After viewing, each child answered items assessing his or her comprehension of the visually and verbally presented content. Children who viewed visual preplays attended longer than did children who viewed nonvisual preplays. Visual presentation predicted comprehension of content presented in a visual mode, whereas inferential narration predicted comprehension of implicit content presented in a verbal made. The results suggest that information processing is modalii specific: Visual presentation affects visual processing and abstract language affects verbal processing. The results do not support the hypothesis that visual presentations interfere with linguistic processing.