Television

Mainstream research on children and television has tended to define children as more or less 'incompetent' viewers. What children do with television is typically compared with adult norms, and thereby found wanting. Children, it is argues, are unselective, uncritical and unsophisticated viewer. They lack many of the 'skills' which are required to make sense of television and to use it in a responsible and sensible way. Thus, it is argued that children are incapable of distinguishing between television fantasy and reality; that they are unable to identify the essential elements of a narrative or the motivations of characters; that they do not understand the persuasive functions of advertising; and that they are ignorant about how television is produced.

On analysing cartoons, it is usually the verbal code which carried the necessary clues for children to 'understand' the plot as a whole. Children have been observed to pay greatest attention to television when other children are talking.

Infants observing the adults around them interpret other codes before the verbal code. They notice pitch differences very early. They can recognise their mother's pitch from that of another female by about 3 weeks old. By a month they can distinguish between different sounds such as 'p' and 'b'. That is, they develop the paradigmatic structures that are the basis of the full phonological system or the basic alphabet of sounds of their language. But they do not begin to crack the phonological code as a system till much later; about 12 months old.

The modality(or perceived reality) of the text is thus the product of a series of judgements made by the reader. This process can be seen to have two dimensions. On the one hand, it depends upon our recognition of formal or stylistic properties that are internal to the text. For example, most cartoons employ graphic conventions- forms of simplification and exaggeration- that are clearly at a greater remove from 'reality' than the rather different photographic conventions of live action filming.

However natural they may appear, these conventions are of course subject to historical and cultural variations; and they are learnt rather than innate. 'Realism' is, in this sense, a relative term; texts are defined as 'realistic' in terms of their relationships with other texts that have been perceived as such in the past. On the other hand, our judgements also depend upon criteria that are external to the text- that is, upon our own experience of, or beliefs about, the real world. Such experiences and beliefs are of course not without their inconsistencies and contradictions; although, broadly speaking, it should be harder to make reliable judgements where the reality that is depicted is remote from our own experience. Yet the potential for diversity here is clearly enormous, perhaps particularly for children, whose understanding of the conventions of the medium and of the world in general is still rapidly changing.