Processing of native and foreign language subtitles in films: An eye tracking study

Marie Josée Bisson*, Walter J.B. Van Heuven, Kathy Conklin, Richard J. Tunney

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Foreign language (FL) films with subtitles are becoming increasingly popular, and many European countries use subtitling as a cheaper alternative to dubbing. However, the extent to which people process subtitles under different subtitling conditions remains unclear. 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. The results revealed that participants read the subtitles irrespective of the subtitling condition. However, participants exhibited more regular reading of the subtitles when the film soundtrack was in an unknown FL. To investigate the incidental acquisition of FL vocabulary, participants also completed an unexpected auditory vocabulary test. Because the results showed no vocabulary acquisition, the need for more sensitive measures of vocabulary acquisition are discussed. Finally, the reading of the subtitles is discussed in relation to the saliency of subtitles and automatic reading behavior.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)399-418
Number of pages20
JournalApplied Psycholinguistics
Volume35
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2014

Bibliographical note

© Cambridge University Press 2012
The online version of this article is published within an Open Access environment subject to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/>. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use.

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