This research was conducted to examine the theoretical basis and findings of an experiment on televised adult instruction. The media coding system element, compositional syntactic placement, was investigated for potential aptitude-treatment interactions on a simple concept learning task. Compositional syntactic placement may be conceptualized as the relative horizontal position of the primary symbol or object within the frame--left, central, or right. Women who were participants in a nonformal workshop viewed a visual stimulus set within a videotaped program in either a left (n = 50), right (n = 50), or central (n = 52) syntactic placement orientation. The instruments used to measure selected learner aptitudes were (1) the Group Embedded Figures Test for field articulation, (2) the Productive Ability Test for general intelligence ability, and (3) the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory for hemispheric dominance. The dependent variable, pretest-posttest difference scores, was assessed with 22-question instruments. Analysis of variance and multiple comparison techniques indicated compositional syntactic placement increased very significantly simple concept learning (p<.0001), and aptitude-treatment interactions were noted (p<.05). The conclusion of this study suggests that there is substantial support for Salomon's supplantation theory, where the choice of specific coding elements within a symbol system may affect the ease with which information is processed by a learner with different aptitude levels. (Author/KC)