ABSTRACT
Verbal and nonverbal forms are the representational codes of television. Because children view television at a very early age, it is tempting to assume that these representational codes are simple and of little interest. However, television is a medium that can be processed at differing levels of complexity. There is a difference between superficial consumption of interesting audiovisual events and mental extraction of information from coded messages, a distinction formulated by Salomon (1979). He used the term ‘literate viewing’ to refer to ‘a process of information extraction by the active negotiation of the coding elements of the message’ (p. 189). The notion of ‘literate viewing’ is closely related to the more informal term ‘media literacy.’ With age and viewing experience, children’s attention to, and comprehension of, television programs change (e.g., Collins, 1979; Krull and Husson, 1979; Calvert, Huston, Watkins, and Wright, 1982). It is presumed that these developmental changes reflect increasing facility with television’s conventions and content, i.e., the beginning television viewer is not ‘media literate’ but instead gradually acquires such competence as a function of experience with the medium and the attainment of certain minimal cognitive abilities.
