Repetition Increases Children's Comprehension of Television Content—Up to a Point

Abstract

Two studies examined the effects of repeated viewing on children's comprehension of videos. In Study 1, 72 children aged 6–8 watched The Sword in the Stone. Afterwards, children who had seen the film before were compared with those for whom the film was novel. In Study 2, 291 children aged 4–8, watched one of two versions of a short story in which the main character's appearance was incongruous with her behavior. Children were tested after one or four exposures. Results of both studies indicated that repetition reduced initial developmental differences in comprehension and helped younger children inhibit the perceptual salience of characters’ appearance. However, children's understanding of the more complex causal sequences and the moral of the film in Study 1 remained low, despite prior exposure.

Keywords:

• Children
• Television
• Comprehension
• Repetition
• VCR

The author Cynthia Hoffner and Joanne Cantor for permission to use the stimulus tape in Study 2, and Joanne Cantor for her considerable help at all stages of this project.

Notes

1. The film was edited in order to maximize the number of children who could see the whole program before their parents came to take them home. The editing did not alter the logic of the film or the sequence of events. The film was shortened by removing two episodes: one where Merlin turns Arthur into a bird, and one where Merlin fights with Madam Mim. Pretests of the shortened version suggested that viewers did not find any discontinuity of action or have problems following the story. Among participants, only one child (an avid fan of the film) commented on the fact that it had been edited.

2. Pretests indicated that open-ended questions about prior exposure to The Sword in the Stone led to wildly inaccurate responses: “I've seen it one hundred times, no, two hundred!”

3. The combination of pictures as prompts and open-ended questions was also used by van den Broek, Lorch, and Thurlow (1996) in their study of children's comprehension of Sesame Street.

4. Children are shown a page with four pictures and asked to point to the picture that shows the meaning of a word. The words get progressively harder and the test ends after the children make a certain number of mistakes.

5. In Hoffner and Cantor's (1985) study the third choice was “She will lock them in a closet.” This was changed because of teacher concerns.

6. Could the seeming effects of repetition be explained by children having become conservers over the course of the five weeks of the study? No. Children's ability to conserve was measured at the same time as their evaluations of the old lady. Thus, nonconservers gave more sophisticated evaluations of the old lady after four exposures, despite the fact that they were nonconservers. They had not become conservers in the course of the study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marie-Louise Mares

Marie-Louise Mares, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison