Young children's recall and reconstruction of audio and audiovisual narratives

It has been claimed that the visual component of audiovisual media dominates young children's cognitive processing. This experiment examines the effects of input modality while controlling the complexity of the visual and auditory content and while varying the comprehension task (recall vs. reconstruction). 4- and 7-year-olds were presented brief stories through either audio or audiovisual media. The audio version consisted of narrated character actions and character utterances. The narrated actions were matched to the utterances on the basis of length and propositional complexity. The audiovisual version depicted the actions visually by means of stop animation instead of by auditory narrative statements. The character utterances were the same in both versions. Audiovisual input produced superior performance on explicit information in the 4-year-olds and produced more inferences at both ages. Because performance on utterances was superior in the audiovisual condition as compared to the audio condition, there was no evidence that visual input inhibits processing of auditory information. Actions were more likely to be produced by the younger children than utterances, regardless of input medium, indicating that prior findings of visual dominance may have been due to the salience of narrative action. Reconstruction, as compared to recall, produced superior depiction of actions at both ages as well as more constrained relevant inferences and narrative conventions.