pragmatic questions about age-related changes in children's comprehension of television advertising will be discussed. Three major questions will be considered: How do children discriminate between programs and commercials? What is the nature of children's understanding of the concept of television advertising? What is the nature of children's memory for commercials? Program-commercial separation. Questions of children's awareness of programs as distinct from commercials revolve around the issue of what constitutes awareness. In evidence of shifts in attention level when commercials come on the screen an indication of "awareness?" Or must the child be able to articulate functional, conceptual explanations of the differences between the two types of content? Evidence from studies of children's attention to commercials suggests that children as young as three or four shift attention upward at the onset of a commercial (Wartella and Ettema, 1974; Zuckerman et al., 1978). Attention to the screen during the commercial has been found to decrease and then shift upward again at the onset of the second commercial in a sequence. Only Ward and Wackman (1973), who had mothers observe their children watching television in homes rather than utilizing trained observers in a controlled viewing situation, do not find movement toward higher attention for young children at the onset of commercials. Advertisements, when embedded in programs, seem to represent the kind of "bit changes" Anderson and his colleagues have been studying as mentioned in section II. In one study, Ward and Wackman (1973) found that five- to twelve year-old children's visual attention to the set decreases at the onset of a commercial--attention went down in the transition from program to commercials. This differentiation in attention was found most strongly for the children at higher cognitive levels (those more than eight). In this study mothers observed their children watching te...
