**3. What toddlers have to learn when they learn to watch movies**

In the preface to the second edition of his book *How To Read A Film*, James Monaco asks "Is it necessary, really, to learn how to read a film?" ([12], p. 17). He immediately answers the question: "Obviously, anyone of minimal intelligence over the age of four can – more or less – grasp the basic content of a film, record, radio or television program without any special training." Monaco was a film critic, not a child development specialist: he could be forgiven his easy equation between learning and training, and for forgetting that we all also learn the much more complex systems of verbal language without any special instruction. However, in his 1992 book *Narrative Comprehension and Film,* Edward Branigan re-poses Monaco's question seriously and in more detail, although only in a footnote:

*It seems remarkable that no one has undertaken to discover what special problems of narrative comprehension may be posed to a child by filmed narratives. For example, when and how do children understand an eyeline match, screen direction, cross-cutting, an unusual angle, off-screen space, or non-diegetic sound? ([13], p. 225)*

Anyone who has taught Film Studies to beginners, even in higher education, will be aware that most adults, let alone children, cannot define any of the six devices that Branigan names, but given that we know (if only on the basis of the Good Housekeeping list referred to above) that by the age of about 3 most children can follow and enjoy at least some full-length mainstream feature films, then it has to be recognised that they can probably "read" these devices before they can speak

fluently. Monaco's dismissive remarks suggest that it's not worth investigating anything that must be so easy to learn that toddlers can do it – although this has not deterred scholars from a huge range of significant research into language acquisition, which happens at the same age. Of course, language acquisition produces evidence in the form of utterances. Evidence of the ability to understand movie language is much harder to pin down.

Paul Messaris argues that many filmic devices, including for example eyeline matches, jump cuts and point of view shots, actually mimic people's everyday perceptions and instinctive behaviour [14], many of which are established in very early childhood. Jerome Bruner describes how, even at nine months old, a child "looks out along the trajectory of an adult's 'point' and, finding nothing there, turns back to check not only the adult's direction of point but the line of visual regard as well" [15, p. 75]: this reflects the mechanisms of the point of view shot (the shot that follows a character assuming a meaningful expression, e.g. delight, terror, etc., as s/he looks at something out of the frame, raising audience expectations that the following shot will show us what s/he is looking at). Similarly, a cut to close-up mimics our behaviour when we suddenly see something we have been looking for (a mislaid bunch of keys, for example) or when we focus in shock on something unexpected (a spider in the bathtub, for example): our attention is tightly focused on the object in question, not on the surroundings. These are just two examples of the ways in which the development of the Institutional Mode of Representation involved moviemakers in creating devices which can seem complex to explain but have what is effectively a metaphoric **r**elationship to human instincts and are therefore easy to learn, as Messaris and Bruner imply.

### **4. The problems of studying toddlers**

There is a noticeable gap in the Early Years research literature between studies of infants (i.e. children up to about 18 months old) and pre-schoolers (i.e. children of 3 years and older). Research on this age-group's media-related behaviour is even rarer. As Plowman and Stevenson point out, such studies inevitably involve "practical and logistical considerations including gaining access, involving children as active research participants and negotiating consents" ([16], p. 330), whereas research samples of infants can be reached through clinics and those of children of 3 and up can be reached through nurseries.

The UK's media regulatory body, Ofcom, part of whose remit is to promote and research media literacy, has an excellent, continuing research programme that monitors adults' and children's media use and attitudes and the changing roles of media in people's lives. But it focuses mainly on children aged 5–15, with a smaller programme that gathers data on 3- and 4-year-olds: typically, they have nothing on the crucial 18–24-month period of life. Where toddlers' movie-related behaviour has been studied, scholars have tended to favour experimental methods, (e.g. [5, 17–20]) and large-scale studies have depended on parental surveys (e.g. [21–23]). Experiments and surveys cannot address what Lemish and Rice, in their 6–8-month study of 16 children aged between 6.5 and 29.5 months, call the "the richness of the interactions surrounding the television experience" ([24], p. 261) or what many parents – at least in Anglophone cultures – describe as typical "terrible twos" behaviour: incessantly adventurous, exploratory and self-willed. A more informed Early Years approach recognises that what is most difficult about studying toddlers is also the essential feature of their behaviour: continuous, often playful, self-driven learning.

#### *Toddlers and Movies: A Fresh Approach DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100259*

Because of these challenges, many scholars have pointed out that longitudinal, ethnographically- styled and if possible home-based research models are the only way we can gain a fuller understanding of toddlers' learning behaviours, given that these typically take place in the home environment [25–31]. Family members are well-positioned to undertake this successfully. Scholars who have studied their own children's development, such as Piaget, Britton, Halliday, Weir and Edmiston, have been deservedly influential in the fields of education, Early Years, language and literacy [32–36]. While access, consent and ethical issues in these contexts are different from those in conventional ethnographies, there is a strong case to be made for the value of parental studies when the focus is on toddlers: children who are mobile, learning to talk, but whose language, and much of their behaviour, are idiosyncratic and hard for anyone outside the family to interpret. But as academic gatekeepers tend to be wary of studies that are based on "small samples" and are dubious about the ethical validity of scholars studying members of their own families, it is understandable that such studies are uncommon. This chapter draws on my own doctoral research study of my twin grandchildren's movie-viewing between the ages of 22 and 42 months, in which I used video (taken unobtrusively on a smartphone) to capture aspects of their behaviour [37].
