SOCIAL SCRIPTS AND DEVELOPMENTAL PATTERNS IN COMPREHENSION OF TELEVISED NARRATIVES

Abstract

Preschool and grade-school children's comprehension of typical commercial television dramatic programs has repeatedly been found to be poor, but few studies have assessed characteristics of children's representations of such shows. In the present research, second, fifth, and eighth graders' recognition errors and recall of an action-adventure drama were examined jointly to determine how children represented plots that they remembered inaccurately. Younger children's representations of the program were especially likely to reflect familiar actions and events sequences (“scripts”), cued by isolated, familiar occurrences in the televised portrayal. Their recognition errors were likely to be action stereotypes, while older viewers' errors were more often confusions about program-specific occurrences. Furthermore, common-knowledge scripts constituted significantly larger proportions of spontaneously cited plot events for younger than for older children. It was suggested that younger and older viewers may differ both in (1) the number and variety of action/event scripts for comprehending typical plots and in (2) the flexibility with which such scripts are applied in comprehending new instances of program content.

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