Children's Responses to Conflicting Auditory and Visual Features of a Televised Narrative.

Children at three age levels (5–6, 8–9, and 10–12 years) were exposed to a televised story in which the auditory and visual content conflicted at the semantic level: a character was depicted as behaving kindly in one channel and cruelly in the other. Comparison groups were exposed to audio-only and video-only versions of the program. It was found that awareness of the auditory-visual discrepancy, assessed at the end of the testing session, increased with age. On a recognition memory test, the presence of conflicting video significantly reduced recognition of the audio content among children in the two older groups, but not among those in the youngest group. This pattern did not emerge for recognition of video content. However, the tendency to interpret video depictions in terms of the inconsistent audio information increased with age. On a measure of free recall, mention of the content of both channels, rather than only one channel, also increased with age. Finally, for all three age groups, personality ratings of the central character were less extreme among respondents exposed to the mismatch version of the program than among those exposed to the audio-only or video-only versions (in which the character exhibited only one type of behavior). Overall, the results were interpreted as indicating a developmental increase in utilization of the semantic content of both channels to form a unified representation of the events in the narrative. However, evaluations of the character's personality suggest that children at all three age levels integrated the content of both channels to some degree.

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