Event knowledge and children's recall of television based narratives

Recent research has established that young children can rapidly develop scr ipts For familiar events, and use such scripts to comprehend and recall inf ormation. Most of the available research has concerned everyday experiences , but relatively little attention has been paid to children's use of event knowledge in processing media content. A total of 96 children aged, 5, 7, 9 and 11 years participated in a study to investigate developmental reliance upon event knowledge in recalling relevision based narratives. Children vi ewed an event based television story presented in a canonical or jumbled ve rsion. Their responses to immediate and delayed recall tests were analysed for completeness and sequencing accuracy. In general, children who viewed t he canonical version recalled more story units and organized their recall m ore accurately chan children who viewed the jumbled version. Young children tended also to reorder the story units in the jumbled version to preserve canonicity. From 9 years of age onwards, children's recall of the jumbled v ersion was as coherent as that of their same age counterparts who watched t he canonical version. These results suggest chat young children tend to dep end on their event knowledge primarily in its canonical form, and with age children become more flexible in using their event knowledge in recalling r outine television narratives.