How Static and Animated Pictures Contribute to Multi-level Mental Representations of Auditory Text in Seven-, Nine-, and Eleven-Year-Old Children

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn our current culture, children are exposed to a huge amount of audiovisual media, of which many formats include animated pictures, such as in videos, for instance. The current study addresses the use of audiovisual media in order to increase the effectiveness of learning and teaching. We examined how auditory text, audiovisual text with static pictures, and audiovisual text with dynamic pictures affect children’s text comprehension. For this purpose, we followed an approach that takes three levels of representation into account: the surface, the textbase, and the situation model. A sample of 108 children aged seven, nine, and eleven years listened to 12 narrative texts that were presented either without pictures, or with pictures that were either static or animated. We used a sentence recognition task to assess memory of all three levels of representation. Our results show that when audiovisual rather than auditory text was presented, surface and situation model representations but not textbase representations were higher. There was no difference between static and dynamic pictures for any level of representation.