Teens’ Bedroom Decor Has Plenty to Say : * Behavior: The way children learn about sex is written loud and clear on their bedroom walls. But beware, therapists say, of a literal translation.

Walls talk.

So if you want some insight on teen-agers, scan those posters of Bon Jovi and Johnny Depp; the photo collages of beer bottles, headlines, iguanas and cigarettes; the abstract drawings of eye balls.

The way adolescents decorate their walls says a lot about how they learn about sexuality and use commercial images to express themselves. It says a lot about the increasing role of the mass media in teen-age development.

Therapists and other experts in adolescent behavior caution parents, however, not to interpret everything they see literally. A 15-year-old may replace her kitten pictures with shots of bare torsos or chic advertisements for vodka. But those images don’t necessarily evidence a sudden interest in drinking or, heaven forbid, sex .

What’s written or posted on an adolescent’s wall “can be studied but not taken literally,” warns Seymour Feshbach, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA.

“Some of it may be whimsical. A lot may have to do with a message, but like dreams, you have to look for recurring themes over a long period of time,” says Feshbach. “What people put on their walls may be a reflection of just one aspect of their personality.”

In other words, beware of clues that seem extreme or obvious. Often the messages are obscure and in the eye of the decorator.

Consider the walls of Kiko Sato, a 16-year-old high school junior who lives in San Francisco.

“Things on my wall have a more personal meaning to me now,” says Sato, who covers her walls with pictures of friends and drawings they’ve made.

“My walls used to be more readable. You could probably know me by what was on my wall,” says Sato. “But now you have to understand me before you look at my walls to understand them. If you look at my Absolut ads,” Sato says, referring to the string of Interview-magazine-size vodka ads above her personal computer, “you wouldn’t necessarily know that I don’t drink and that I like the ads for their design. (And) you wouldn’t know that I put the Camel (cigarettes) ad up to throw things at and to remind myself how sexist things still are.”

To a large extent, what appeals to most teen-agers about decorating their walls is expressing their individuality in a semi-public way. And analysts warn that censoring an adolescent’s walls may amount to curbing their individuality. Often, the best answer is a compromise.

Noah Bardach, 16, who goes to Brentwood School in Pacific Palisades, says that when his mother remodeled their home--including his room--they compromised on his walls. He could draw on them--but only in pencil.

“My idea of a perfect room is very different from my mother’s,” says Bardach, who describes his new walls as “pristine, functional and very well done.”

“They are not me at all,” says Bardach who wears tie-dye T-shirts and long hair and prefers not to wear shoes. “But as long as I have the doors and walls to draw on, I’m happy.”

So along with his posters of the Grateful Dead, Bardach sketches directly onto the white walls--usually large recreations of works by Di Vinci and Michelangelo. The prized wall exhibit of this self-proclaimed “tour head” (Bardach says he’s attended more than 20 Grateful Dead concerts) is an original etching from the Nuremberg Chronicles of 1492.

Because of his freedom to express and combine his developing interests, and his mother’s remodeling, Bardach’s personalized walls change frequently.

In one of his wall sketches last month, he shows the hand of God, from Michelangelo’s “God’s Creation,” reaching out to touch the hand of a member of the Grateful Dead.

“My walls tell that I am a mix of a million different things: an old ‘tour head’ and an archeologist. It says I’m not studious but interested and well-read. It says I’m not a jock,” says Bardach who likes exercise but says he hates competition.

Teen-agers may put provocative images on their walls to express defiance and rebellion from parents or authority, but most therapists say parents should not tamper with their walls.

“A child’s room is their sanctum,” says Feshbach. “What they put on their walls is their privilege. Censoring what they put on their walls is like censoring what they write in their letters,” Feshbach adds.

There are limits, of course. If racial epithets appear, it’s time for a parent to have a serious talk with the child. But generally, says Feshbach, the kids should have carte blanche in this area of self-expression.

“When I was 14 1/2, I was embarrassed by some of the things I had put on my wall when I was 13,” says 22-year-old Ann Rose, a receptionist in Santa Cruz. “And when I was 15, I put things on my wall only to shock my parents and show friends I was an individual.

“But now I laugh and think it was all a part of me at some time. That’s a nice feeling, to take some of the posters out of the closet and vividly remember thoughts I had when I was in sixth grade or 11th. It’s nice to see that I’m always changing, growing.”

The study of wall talk has even caught the attention of academics.

Jane Brown, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina, recently studied 19 girls ages 11 to 15 to see how adolescents learn about sexuality from the mass media. Her study, although relatively limited, provides a glimpse of how teen-age girls first interpret and use commercial images literally to define themselves and then, as they grow older, manipulate those images in an increasingly sophisticated way.

In her research, patterns emerged that allowed her to categorize the girls in terms of both what they selected to decorate their walls and how it was interpreted. She classified girls at three levels.

Girls with the least sexual experience--those who had only held hands with a boy--had the most straightforward material on their walls. Most of the posters were of animals or nature scenes. Many of the items were home-made, such as drawings or needle-point samplers.

Noy Bunla, 12, who shares her room with her 14- and 16-year-old sisters in Los Angeles’ Mid-City area, for example, likes to tape completed jigsaw puzzles on her walls, while her sisters post pictures of Will Smith from DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Luke Perry of “Beverly Hills, 90210” and Johnny Depp, star of “Edward Scissorhands” and “21 Jump Street.”

At the second level, most of the girls said they had kissed boys. Their walls alternated youthful images next to objects of more mature desire, like partially dressed men. But the images were not usually combined in collages.

Level III girls had the greatest amount of sexual experience, ranging from heavy petting to sexual intercourse. As for girls at levels I and II, there were stuffed animals, dolls and nature posters in their rooms. But unlike girls in the other groups, these more mature girls frequently took mainstream images like advertisements and personalized them by placing them with other items and writing on the images.

Brown also examined the stereotype that girls spend more time in their rooms and are more interested in decorating their walls than boys.

“The theory is that boys spend most of their time outside their rooms and are outwardly focused,” says Brown. But after the study, she says she is not convinced that it’s true.

Casey Baker, a 17-year-old senior at San Dieguito High School in San Diego, takes a greater interest and pride in decorating his room than does his sister Jorli, 15.

“My walls are a personal statement; they tell people who I am,” says Casey, who has has just about everything on his walls: abstract drawings of eyeballs floating in the air, an iguana posted above his door, world history charts, his own painting of J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield (with the red hunting hat as he imagines it) and poems he’s written.

Jorli, who plays volleyball and hopes one day to be an astronaut, covers her walls with posters to hide her parrot wallpaper. She originally selected the paper for “the jungle look, but it ended up looking more like a nursery,” she explains.

She dismisses most of what she puts on her walls as insignificant, except a boldly lettered statement she cut out from a magazine: “The only difference between my present situation and my desired results are the choices I make.”

In many rooms, you can begin to understand what’s going on inside of a teen-ager’s head, says Lynn Ponton, a professor of child and adolescent psychology at UC San Francisco.

“Many of them go into great detail in describing their rooms,” says Ponton. “They want to explain the things they put on their walls and they open up.”

But Ponton echoes the warnings of other experts against literal interpretations. Within the year, Ponton says, wall decorations are likely to change more than once. And through the teen years, they often change drastically.

Take, for example, 18-year-old UC Berkeley student Cindy’s room.

Before she hit her teens, every ledge and seat in Cindy’s room overflowed with dolls and teddy bears. Her walls were plastered with posters of animals. During junior high school, she replaced a few kitten posters with Bon Jovi.

High school hit Cindy’s room like an explosion, shelling out posters of Guns ‘N Roses, Metallica, Steve Winwood and Slaughter. Men of all sorts peered out from every corner of her collaged wall, while her teddy bears clung to their chairs.

Now in her college dorm, Cindy has one last relic of her youth posted to the wall--a poster of Disney’s Snow White with “Ha Ha!” scribbled across the bottom.