hildren's understanding of these "formal features," the symbol system of television, is sparse. There is some indication that children's confusion regarding interpretations of television messages may be the result of their misunderstanding of these formal features of television. For instance, Dorr (forthcoming) reports that the five- to seven-year-old children she talked with could not understand how Steve Austin, the "Six Million Dollar Man," could catch the bad guys when he ran so slowly. These children obviously were not interpreting the use of slow motion as an indicator of bionic strength. Some indication of children's relative lack of understanding of television production features comes from research by Tada (1969), who examined Japanese children's comprehension of film images. He found strong age-related differences in children s understanding of various production techniques and their relationship to theme development. For example, in one study he presented elementary school children with an industrial film about the development of factories along Japan's coastal fishing villages. The film opened with scenes of quiet fishing villages and then cut to groups of factories being built along these shores. Fewer than half of the third-grade children who saw this film were able to predict the effect of the factories on these fishing villages as intended by the producer. Further, these children had difficulty understanding any connection between these two scenes. Tada found that elementary school children had difficulty understanding and predicting the direction of theme development in the film, and that much of the difficulty stemmed from misunderstanding production techniques. His interpretation is that the young children had not yet learned to "read" film images and understand the symbolic meanings of different film techniques such as scenic shifts, rhythm montage, and image symbolism. Research by Huston-Stein (1977) in the United S...
