To understand how children respond to and make use of portrayals of the sexes on television, 192 third and eighth grade students participated in a study to determine what they notice and how important these distinctions are to them. The study obtained children's same/different paired comparisons of eight concepts--me, my mother, an average woman, an average television woman, and four television characters (Bionic Woman, Cher, Mary Tyler Moore, and Mrs. Walton), and explored two models of influence on salience scores, a television viewing and perceptions model and a sex role socialization model, using the three comparison dimensions of youth/vitality, reality, and competence. Results indicated that the variables of a sex-role socialization model are related to children's use of these three dimensions for comparing real-life and television women and that cognitive variables of children's own perceptions can be used in media effects studies. (AEA)