The "preplay" technique, an advance organizer summarizing important plot events before sections of a story, is examined for its effectiveness in facilitating children's selective attention to and comprehension of televised stories. One hundred and sixty first through fourth grade children, equally distributed by grade and sex, were randomly selected from three midwestern schools. Pairs of same-sex children viewed a prosocial cartoon in one of five viewing conditions. In the four treatment conditions, the type of preplay varied by visual-nonvisual and concrete/inferential narration. The fifth condition was a control with no preplays. After each subject's visual attention to the television screen was scored, they were asked to order four picture sets taken from the television program to assess temporal integration of the story. In addition, children were asked to answer 42 multiple-choice items intended to assess their recognition of inferential, central-concrete, and incidental content. As predicted, children attended longer to visual than nonvisual preplays. Boys and younger children were especially attentive to visual and concrete preplays, while girls and older children were more attentive to inferential preplays. Also, as predicted, children who saw visual preplays correctly sequenced more pictures than children who saw nonvisual preplays and they recognized more incidental content. (MP)