Children’s comprehension of time and their interpretation of event relations in narrative film: the tangled case of flashbacks

Audiovisual narratives are widely adopted as a resource for promoting children’s learning and critical multimodal literacy, which involves considering the social themes presented in multimodal texts. Previous research reveals that storytelling that employs achronological sequencing challenges children’s temporal cognition and narrative comprehension. Little is known, however, about how children’s comprehension of events relates to their interpretation of higher-level meanings, such as event causality and character development, which children’s films often convey through complex narrative strategies. To address this gap, this article proposes an empirical multimodal discourse–semantic approach to children’s reception of narrative complexity in film. The approach incorporates a social semiotic framework for analysing temporal relations in children’s narrative and a model of the relationship between children’s comprehension and their interpretation of film. The authors illustrate this approach through an exploratory investigation of 28 (7 to 10-year-old) children’s responses to two flashback scenes from popular Disney films. The results indicate that children’s comprehension of temporal relations supports their interpretation of event causality and character development. The investigation highlights the value of their approach for predicting and empirically testing the effect of complex narrative strategies on children’s film reception.