Subtitles and Eye Tracking: Reading and Performance
Abstract
This article presents an experimental study to investigate whether subtitle
reading has a positive impact on academic performance. In the absence of
reliable indexes of reading behavior in dynamic texts, the article first formulates
and validates an index to measure the reading of text, such as subtitles
on film. Eye-tracking measures (fixations and saccades) are expressed as
functions of the number of standard words and word length and provide a
reliable index of reading behavior of subtitles over extended audiovisual
texts. By providing a robust index of reading over dynamic texts, this article
lays the foundation for future studies combining behavioral measures and
performance measures in fields such as media psychology, educational psychology,
multimedia design, and audiovisual translation. The article then
utilizes this index to correlate the degree to which subtitles are read and the
performance of students who were exposed to the subtitles in a comprehension
test. It is found that a significant positive correlation is obtained between
comprehension and subtitle reading for the sample, providing some evidence
in favor of using subtitles in reading instruction and language learning. The
study, which was conducted in the context of English subtitles on academic
lectures delivered in English, further seems to indicate that the number of
words and the number of lines do not play as big a role in the processing of
subtitles as previously thought but that attention distribution across different
redundant sources of information results in the partial processing of
subtitles.