advertising, and audience size (the basic economic structures underlying the television industry) is a more complex notion to understand, one with which many adults might have difficulty. Dorr (forthcoming) reports that none of the elementary school children she spoke with understood the complex economic basis of television programming and advertising. To the best of our knowledge, children have only rudimentary understanding of the business of television. Summary of children's understanding of television content. The picture f children's understanding of television is one which indicates that, on a number of dimensions, children in elementary school are not so competent as adults in processing television messages. By kindergarten, when adultlike televiewing begins, children have rudimentary understanding of television characters and actions, probably perceiving television in discrete action bits. Preschooler's interpretations of television programs are probably quite idiosyncratic. Children as old as eight or nine (second or third grade) have been shown to have difficulty in identifying program information which is considered by adults to be central to understanding plotlines. Further, these relatively older children have been shown to have difficulty explaining character motivations for behavior and tend to describe characters in terms of very surface characteristics, such as appearance and behaviors. Similarly, understanding about the television medium as an economic business is only rudimentary in grade school. In particular, public controversy surrounds the question of children's knowledge and awareness about advertising content on television. In the next section, consideration will be given to several of the research studies regarding when and how children acquire an understanding of advertising content as distinct from other types of programming. III. CHILDREN'S UNDERSTANDING OF TELEVISION ADVERTISING In this last section several...
