Over 300 verbal and behavioral associations between television and real life were recorded by observing three preschool children for three years and gathering supplementary information from five other children. The children's associations to real life experience made during television viewing occurred consistently earlier than associations to television from the context of daily experience. Regardless of age and amount of television viewed, children consistently used real life as the background against which television was compared. Of the 11 types of associations that were documented, some were found to occur regardless of age, including children commenting on the similarities/differences between television and real life, their requests for televised objects, and their imitation of television characters. Two-year-old children did not perceive the two worlds as separate, and were confused as to the nature of the boundary between the two realms. When the children were four years old, they demonstrated a clearer understanding of the boundary, but they also tended to be overly rigid about the unreality of televised material. At five years of age, the children understood the principal kinds of relationships between television and the rest of their experience, but they were still insensitive to certain connections. (Author/RL)