This report, the third in a series of six reports on television advertising and children, describes a study designed to determine how the massive exposure to television affects children's language development. A total of 153 children in grades K-6 were interviewed about the entertainment, informational, and advertising content of 24 programs popular with children. The language maturity of the children was assessed using a word association paradigm to measure the complexity of their recognition of the relationships among words in the language. Respondents were divided into four age groups, and partial correlations were computed between television viewing and language maturity, controlling for intelligence, number of older siblings, and socioeconomic status. Averaging across the four age groups indicated a slight negative partial correlation between viewing and each language variable, suggesting that television exposure generally inhibited language development. Slopes were graphed to determine how television viewing affected the rate of development across each point in time compared to the previous norms. This analysis provides further evidence of the retarding effect of television viewing, especially in the 8- to 11-year-old range. (JMB)