Cristina Cambra

Comprehension of Television Messages by Deaf Students at Various Stages of Education

Since television captioning first became available in Spain, advances have occurred on two fronts: a progressive increase in the number of programs with captions and improved captioning technology. The present study explores the effectiveness of captioning through analysis of deaf viewers’ comprehension, taking into account the contribution of the program’s verbal and visual information. The study participants, comprising two groups of deaf students at different educational stages, were asked to explain what they had understood after watching a film under two conditions: voice and sound but without captions; and voice, sound, and captions. Results indicate that deaf students have difficulty accessing the information even under the voice/sound/caption condition, not only due to their level of reading ability but also to the speed of caption presentation when oral content is literally transcribed on the screen in its entirety.

Graphical Representations of a Television Series: A Study with Deaf and Hearing Adolescents

The understanding of a television story can be very different depending on the age of the viewer, their background knowledge, the content of the programme and the way in which they combine the information gathered from linguistic, audio and visual elements. This study explores the different ways of interpreting an audiovisual document considering that, due to a hearing impaired, visual, audio and linguistic information could be perceived very differently to the way it is by hearing people. The study involved the participation of 20 deaf and 20 hearing adolescents, aged 12 to 19 years who, after watching a fragment of a television series, were asked to draw a picture of what had happened in the story. The results show that the graphical representation of the film is similar for both groups in terms of the number of scenes, but there is greater profusion, in the deaf group, of details about the context and characters, and there are differences in their interpretations of some of the sequences in the story.