Frankenfield, A., Richards, J.E., Pempek, T.A., Kirkorian, H.L., & Anderson, D.L. (2004) Looking at and interacting with comprehensible and incomprehensible Teletubbies. International Society for Infancy Studies, Chicago, IL.
Attention to television by preschool children is related to program comprehensibility. Comprehension, in turn, is dependent on two important cognitive abilities - understanding of language and understanding of event sequences. There is no question that by age 3 children comprehend TV made for them, but increasingly, TV programs and videos are being made for children 2 and under. This experiment uses a procedure developed by Anderson et al. (1981) to determine whether very young children discriminate comprehensible from incomprehensible versions of Teletubbies. At this time, data have been collected and analyzed for 24-month-olds. We are collecting data from 18-month-olds, 12-month-olds, and 6-month-olds.
Participants were 25, 24-month-old children. Each infant viewed one of two 40-minute videos of Teletubbies containing normal segments of the show, as well as distortions of the same segments. Twelve of the subjects viewed backward speech distortions, while thirteen viewed distortions created through random rearrangement of camera shots. Each child sat on his/her parent's lap approximately 30" from the television screen. The children were free to play with toys, watch the television, or interact with their parent. Videotapes of the sessions were coded for looks at the television and interactions with the show.
A mixed-model ANOVA indicated that children looked at normal more than distorted segments, but the effect was smaller and only marginal for backward speech. The results for random edit were complicated by strong order effects, with children receiving the normal segment first watching normal more than distorted, and those receiving distorted first paying low but equal amounts of attention. A between-subjects analysis of the first trial data of mean look length and mean percent looking indicated that subjects viewing the normal segments had greater attention than those subjects viewing the distorted segments. Analysis of interactions supported the effect of comprehensibility with children interacting more during normal segments.
There was a surprising negative relationship between prior experience with Teletubbies and attention to the show. Children who had not previously viewed Teletubbies paid more attention to normal segments than to distorted versions. However, if children had prior experience with the show, they paid equal (but lower) attention to both the normal and distorted segments.
24-month-olds behaviorally discriminated comprehensible from incomprehensible Teletubbies, but only if they hadn't seen the program before. For this age group, familiarity may overwhelm the importance of comprehensibility. It is an open question at this time whether younger children will discriminate comprehensibility at all.