Footnote 1 In a study involving 246 primary schoolchildren watching a 15-min film with standard subtitles, Koolstra and Beentjes ( Reference Koolstra and Beentjes1999) found that on a 28-item auditory vocabulary test, scores were higher in the group who had the FL soundtrack and the native language subtitles (20 correct answers) as opposed to the group with the FL soundtrack only (19 correct answers). One of the particular advantages of subtitling over dubbing is the potential for incidental acquisition of FL vocabulary. However, because of the limitations of those studies, it is difficult to reach any more definitive conclusions. Overall, the first few studies on the processing of subtitles do indicate that viewers spend some of the presentation time looking at the subtitle area. The number of participants in that 1989 study was reported (12 in each experiment) however, the other methodological limitations mentioned above remain problematic. In a study with children from Grades 2 to 6, D'Ydewalle and van Rensbergen ( Reference D'Ydewalle, van Rensbergen, Mandl and Levin1989) found that the children also spent time looking in the subtitle area, and interestingly, this practice varied depending on the type of film: less time was spent in the subtitle area for an action film. Unfortunately, the descriptions of these two studies lack many methodological details (e.g., the number of participants, the language background of the participants, and the number of subtitles used in the study). However, another study found that participants spent 30% of the subtitle's presentation time looking in the subtitle area (D'Ydewalle, van Rensbergen, & Pollet, Reference D'Ydewalle, van Rensbergen, Pollet, O'Regan and Levy-Schoen1987). In an initial study, D'Ydewalle, Muylle, and van Rensbergen ( Reference D'Ydewalle, Muylle, van Rensbergen, Groner, McConkie and Menz1985) found that participants fixated upon one or two words per subtitle, leading them to conclude that not much reading of the subtitles occurred. They used eye tracking to measure the amount of time a viewer spent looking in the subtitle area as a function of the subtitle's presentation time with standard subtitles. Some studies in the 1980s investigated the allocation of attention to the different sources of information in this multimodal situation. Furthermore, the information coming from these different sources may be redundant, which can render the reading of the subtitles less compelling. When watching a film with subtitles, a viewer has to process not only three sources of information (the soundtrack, the subtitles, and the dynamic images in the film), but also the multilingual situation with both FL and native language. Nowadays, it is often possible to add subtitles in different languages to films or television programs at the press of a button. This is called standard subtitling, and it is often preferred to dubbing as it is cheaper and keeps the original voice of the actors, thus avoiding the issue of lip synchronicity (Koolstra, Peeters, & Spinhof, Reference Koolstra, Peeters and Spinhof2002). Finally, the reading of the subtitles is discussed in relation to the saliency of subtitles and automatic reading behavior.Īn increasing number of films are imported from abroad and broadcast in the original foreign language (FL) soundtrack with subtitles added in the native language. Because the results showed no vocabulary acquisition, the need for more sensitive measures of vocabulary acquisition are discussed. To investigate the incidental acquisition of FL vocabulary, participants also completed an unexpected auditory vocabulary test. However, participants exhibited more regular reading of the subtitles when the film soundtrack was in an unknown FL. The results revealed that participants read the subtitles irrespective of the subtitling condition. In this study, participants watched part of a film under standard (FL soundtrack and native language subtitles), reversed (native language soundtrack and FL subtitles), or intralingual (FL soundtrack and FL subtitles) subtitling conditions while their eye movements were recorded. However, the extent to which people process subtitles under different subtitling conditions remains unclear. Foreign language (FL) films with subtitles are becoming increasingly popular, and many European countries use subtitling as a cheaper alternative to dubbing.
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