LINGUIST List 26.3761
Tue Aug 25 2015
Qs: Subtitles Improving L1 Comprehension/Performance
Editor for this issue: Anna White <awhitelinguistlist.org>
Date: 25-Aug-2015
From: Zachary Burchill <zburchill
mail.bcs.rochester.edu>
Subject: Subtitles Improving L1 Comprehension/Performance
E-mail this message to a friend The purpose of this query is to find 1) whether similar projects have been attempted and/or 2) possible relevant, related studies that meet a combination of criteria.
Although there is a vast amount of literature on how captions/subtitles affect L2 language learning, after consulting many different professors and diligently searching Google Scholar, I have not found any studies that address how captions or subtitles affect L1 listeners' comprehension/performance (the language of the subtitles is the same as the speech and the same as the native language of the listener). In some regards, this dearth of research make sense: generally people understand their own language well enough that subtitles seem redundant. However, in adverse listening conditions (such as a noisy environment or accented speech), it seems intuitive that subtitles might boost comprehension (even perhaps for later instances of similar speech without the subtitles present).
In particular, I would like to know if any studies that meet some combination of the following (unordered) criteria exist:
1) Examine how subtitles or captions affect listeners' comprehension (where subtitle lang. = speech lang. = listener lang.)
2) Examine the effect of subtitles or captions on performance of non-language learning tasks (e.g. how subtitles in an engineering lecture might help students get better grades)
3) Examine how subtitles affect comprehension of regional dialects or non-native speech (where the listener's L1 is the same language as the dialect)
4) If studies that fit none of the other criteria can be found, I'd also be interested in studies that examine how listeners' comprehension of a language/accent/dialect affects performance on non-language learning tasks (such as recalling trivia that was presenting in the less familiar language/dialect, etc.)
Although I am specifically looking for studies in which the speaker is communicating to the listener in the listener's native language, I have tagged this query in the Language Acquisition subfield because of its similarities to language learning studies.
Thank you!
Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
Language Acquisition
Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Page Updated: 25-Aug-2015