Wim De Bruycker

Eye Movements of Children and Adults While Reading Television Subtitles

Abstract. Eye movements of children (Grade 5-6) and adults were monitored while they were watching a foreign language movie with either standard (foreign language soundtrack and native language sub...

Reading Native and Foreign Language Television Subtitles in Children and Adults

Publisher Summary Subtitles are processed automatically, with no major age differences. With remote foreign languages, switching the languages in soundtrack and subtitle (reversed subtitling) leads to less time being spent in the subtitles. This chapter reviews studies on attention allocation to subtitled television programs. In a standard subtitling, subtitles are fluently processed and true reading is apparent. This is certainly the case with two-line subtitles because they provide a considerable amount of content information that cannot be inferred directly from the pictorial information. With reversed subtitling, systematic reading is less clear. While there are no major differences between one-line reversed and one-line standard subtitles, the findings with two-line reversed subtitles suggest that occasionally some words in the subtitle are processed. The eye-movement studies discussed in the chapter were not designed to infer to what extent the soundtrack of a movie was processed. Younger children discarded the foreign language soundtrack when native language subtitles were available. With reversed subtitling, a similar pattern emerged. Adults are able to process both the native language soundtrack and the foreign language subtitles. Children, on the other hand, do not have enough information processing capacities and therefore concentrate almost exclusively on the information source—the native language soundtrack—that is easiest to process while paying less attention to the foreign language subtitles.