Video Captioning and Subtitles in Second Language Listening Comprehension: Fast-Paced Versus Slow-Paced Speakers.

The present study examines the impact of implementing video captioning and subtitles on listening comprehension with special reference to the speaker's speed. A total of 64 undergraduate Saudi EFL learners were assigned into six groups: fast speaker with full captioning, fast speaker with subtitles, fast speaker with no captioning nor subtitles, slow speaker with full captioning, and slow speaker with subtitles, slow speaker with no captioning nor subtitles. Each group was instructed to watch a video in English under its assigned condition and then answered a listening test. Participants also answered a questionnaire to determine the impact of these conditions on their cognitive load. The results revealed that the group that viewed the video of slow speakers with a caption obtained the highest score on the listening comprehension test, followed by the group that viewed the video of fast speakers with a caption. The group that viewed no caption video of fast speakers obtained the lowest scores. The questionnaire analysis indicated that the students in the subtitle slow group reported using low mental effort, whereas the students in the caption fast group reported using very high mental effort followed by the students in the caption slow group who also reported using high mental effort.

Effect of Subtitles on Gaze Behavior during Shot Changes: An Eye-tracking Study.

The study provides a comprehensive picture of the effect of subtitles on the gaze behavior of the participants while watching continuity editing and discontinuity editing style cinema. Three video clips (with English subtitles and without subtitles) of continuity editing and discontinuity editing styles were presented to participants. The video clips came from English movies and the participants were not native English speakers. Entry time, dwell time, first fixation time, scan path, and average fixation duration were taken as dependent variables in this within-group study. The eye-tracking data gathered were subjected to repeated measures of two-way ANOVA and paired t-test. Results revealed that the appearance of subtitles at the bottom of the screen changed the eye movement pattern of the participants during the shot changes. Timing of the subtitle starting point (before the cut or after the cut) also affected the gaze behavior. The editing style, however, did not make any difference in the gaze behavior of participants while watching subtitled video clips. Further, participants preferred reading subtitles to seeing visual images even if the subtitles were presented during the shot changes.

Este estudio provee una imagen completa del efecto de subtítulos en el comportamiento de la mirada en múltiples participantes viendo películas elaboradas con edición continua y discontinua. Tres videoclips (con y sin subtítulos en inglés) con estilos de edición continua y discontinua fueron presentados a los participantes. Los videoclips fueron extraídos de películas de habla inglesa, y los participantes no eran hablantes nativos de inglés. Tiempo de entrada, tiempo de permanencia, tiempo de primera fijación, trayectoria de escaneo, y duración promedio de fijación, fueron tomados como variables dependientes en este estudio entre grupos. La data de rastreo ocular recolectada fue sometida a un ANOVA de dos vías de medidas repetidas y a pruebas-t pareadas. Los resultados revelaron que la presencia de subtítulos en la parte baja de la pantalla cambió el patrón de movimiento ocular de los participantes durante los cambios de toma. El momento de aparición de los subtítulos (antes o después de los cortes) también afectó el comportamiento de la mirada. Sin embargo, el estilo de edición no generó ninguna diferencia en el comportamiento de la mirada de los participantes mientras veían los videoclips subtitulados. Adicionalmente, los participantes prefirieron leer los subtítulos que ver las imágenes visuales, incluso si estos subtítulos se presentaban durante cambios de toma.

The visible subtitler: Blockchain technology towards right management and minting.

Background: Subtitles are produced through different workflows and technologies: from fully automatic to human in open source web editors or in-house platforms, and increasingly through hybrid human-machine interaction. There is little agreement regarding subtitle copyright beyond the understanding that it is a derivative work. While same language verbatim subtitles may have little room for creativity, interlingual subtitling is heavily dependent on the subtitler skills to translate, prioritise, and condense information. These days creative subtitles are increasingly being used as one more aesthetic element in audiovisual narrative. Though they may be in the same language, the visual attributes that contribute to the narrative development make creative subtitles one more element that should be acknowledged and copyright protected. Methods: The paper will present a short introduction to subtitling copyright. It will then describe centralised and decentralised copyright management - where blockchain technology can be applied to aid subtitler identification. A focus group with expert professional subtitlers was organised, and feedback is reported. Conclusions: Subtitle copyright is country dependent, still subtitling working practices and media asset distribution have no geographical borders. Blockchain technology -as a concept- could aid subtitle traceability. This can be useful beyond financial and moral right management and work towards media sustainability, allowing for reuse and repurpose of existing media assets.

Censorship as enabling: importing, distributing, and translating foreign films in the Arab Middle East.

Control over film exhibition in commercial film theatres globally has been perceived as a practice that an exclusive authority has enforced for so long. This study which casts light on the control enforced on foreign film exhibition in commercial cinemas in the Arab Middle East (AME), uncovers a system of foreign film exhibition in the AME that has been ever obscure to the public audience, readership, and researchers in fields like film studies and the broadcast of audiovisual content. The analysis of this system is based upon interviews with key agents involved in decision making regarding the foreign films selected for exhibition and the censorial practices implemented to make these selected films culturally suitable for commercial cinemas in the AME. These interviewees include an exhibitor in a regional film import and distribution company, film classifiers, and film translators. Their input helps to analyse the processes of foreign film selection, scene filtering, distribution, and classification that are all incorporated in the system of foreign film exhibition. Furthermore, this analysis helps to uncover an obscure system of exhibition and identify the policymaking process and the policymakers involved in this context. Thus, while this study argues that this system enables film exhibition, it challenges the prevailing perception that control over foreign film exhibition in the AME is exclusively enforced by an authority generally known as the board of censors.

SUBTLEX-CAT: Subtitle word frequencies and contextual diversity for Catalan.

SUBTLEX-CAT is a word frequency and contextual diversity database for Catalan, obtained from a 278-million-word corpus based on subtitles supplied from broadcast Catalan television. Like all previous SUBTLEX corpora, it comprises subtitles from films and TV series. In addition, it includes a wider range of TV shows (e.g., news, documentaries, debates, and talk shows) than has been included in most previous databases. Frequency metrics were obtained for the whole corpus, on the one hand, and only for films and fiction TV series, on the other. Two lexical decision experiments revealed that the subtitle-based metrics outperformed the previously available frequency estimates, computed from either written texts or texts from the Internet. Furthermore, the metrics obtained from the whole corpus were better predictors than the ones obtained from films and fiction TV series alone. In both experiments, the best predictor of response times and accuracy was contextual diversity.

A comparison of homonym meaning frequency estimates derived from movie and television subtitles, free association, and explicit ratings.

Most words are ambiguous, with interpretation dependent on context. Advancing theories of ambiguity resolution is important for any general theory of language processing, and for resolving inconsistencies in observed ambiguity effects across experimental tasks. Focusing on homonyms (words such as bank with unrelated meanings EDGE OF A RIVER vs. FINANCIAL INSTITUTION), the present work advances theories and methods for estimating the relative frequency of their meanings, a factor that shapes observed ambiguity effects. We develop a new method for estimating meaning frequency based on the meaning of a homonym evoked in lines of movie and television subtitles according to human raters. We also replicate and extend a measure of meaning frequency derived from the classification of free associates. We evaluate the internal consistency of these measures, compare them to published estimates based on explicit ratings of each meaning's frequency, and compare each set of norms in predicting performance in lexical and semantic decision mega-studies. All measures have high internal consistency and show agreement, but each is also associated with unique variance, which may be explained by integrating cognitive theories of memory with the demands of different experimental methodologies. To derive frequency estimates, we collected manual classifications of 533 homonyms over 50,000 lines of subtitles, and of 357 homonyms across over 5000 homonym-associate pairs. This database-publicly available at: www.blairarmstrong.net/homonymnorms/ -constitutes a novel resource for computational cognitive modeling and computational linguistics, and we offer suggestions around good practices for its use in training and testing models on labeled data.

Selling safety: the use of celebrities in improving awareness of safety in commercial aviation.

The aim of this study was to investigate the influential power of a celebrity to convey key safety messages in commercial aviation using a pre-flight safety briefing video. In addition, the present research sought to examine the effectiveness of subtitles in aiding the recall of these important messages as well as how in-cabin aircraft noise affects recall of this information. A total of 101 participants were randomly divided into four groups (no noise without subtitles, no noise with subtitles, noise without subtitles and noise with subtitles) and following exposure to a pre-recorded pre-flight safety briefing video were tested for recall of key safety messages within that video. Participants who recognised and recalled the name of the celebrity in the safety briefing video recalled significantly more of the messages than participants who did not recognise the celebrity. Subtitles were also found to be effective, however, only in the presence of representative in-cabin aircraft noise. Practitioner Summary: Passenger attention to pre-flight safety briefings on commercial aircraft is poor. Utilising the celebrity status of a famous person may overcome this problem. Results suggest that celebrities do increase the recall of safety-related information.

On the advantages of word frequency and contextual diversity measures extracted from subtitles: The case of Portuguese.

We examined the potential advantage of the lexical databases using subtitles and present SUBTLEX-PT, a new lexical database for 132,710 Portuguese words obtained from a 78 million corpus based on film and television series subtitles, offering word frequency and contextual diversity measures. Additionally we validated SUBTLEX-PT with a lexical decision study involving 1920 Portuguese words (and 1920 nonwords) with different lengths in letters (M = 6.89, SD = 2.10) and syllables (M = 2.99, SD = 0.94). Multiple regression analyses on latency and accuracy data were conducted to compare the proportion of variance explained by the Portuguese subtitle word frequency measures with that accounted by the recent written-word frequency database (Procura-PALavras; P-PAL; Soares, Iriarte, et al., 2014 ). As its international counterparts, SUBTLEX-PT explains approximately 15% more of the variance in the lexical decision performance of young adults than the P-PAL database. Moreover, in line with recent studies, contextual diversity accounted for approximately 2% more of the variance in participants' reading performance than the raw frequency counts obtained from subtitles. SUBTLEX-PT is freely available for research purposes (at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases ).

As naturalistic as it gets: subtitles in the English classroom in Norway.

This study aimed to investigate the effects of subtitles in the context of authentic material on second language comprehension and potentially, second language acquisition for Norwegian learners of English. Participants in the study were 49 17-year-old students and 65 16-year-old students, who were all native speakers of Norwegian learning English as an L2 in high school. Both age groups were divided into three Conditions, where one group watched an episode of the American animated cartoon Family Guy with Norwegian subtitles, one group with English subtitles, and one group watched the episode with no subtitles. On a comprehension questionnaire conducted immediately after watching the episode positive short-term effects of both native language (L1) and target language (L2) subtitles were found for both age groups. However, no differences in terms of the language of the subtitles were found in the older and more advanced group. Four weeks later the participants responded to a word definition task and a word recall task to investigate potential long-term effects of the subtitles. The only long-term effect was found in the word definition task and was modulated by age. We found, however, that native language subtitles impact negatively on performance on the comprehension task. The results from this study suggest that the mere presence of subtitles as an additional source of information enhances learners' comprehension of the plot and content in animated audio-visual material in their L2. The absence of differences in terms of the language of the subtitles in the more advanced group suggests that both intralanguage and interlanguage subtitles can aid target language comprehension in very advanced learners, most probably due to better consolidated vocabulary knowledge in that group. The two groups differed also on predictors of performance on the two lexical tasks. While in the less proficient younger group, vocabulary status best predicted performance on both tasks (vocabulary predicts vocabulary), for the very advanced older group, grammar was a stronger predictor, highlighting the importance of generic language competence and skills in L2 tasks for highly proficient L2 users. We also found an effect of written L2 skills on performance on both lexical tasks indicative of the role of orthography in vocabulary consolidation.

Subtitle-based word frequencies as the best estimate of reading behavior: the case of greek.

Previous evidence has shown that word frequencies calculated from corpora based on film and television subtitles can readily account for reading performance, since the language used in subtitles greatly approximates everyday language. The present study examines this issue in a society with increased exposure to subtitle reading. We compiled SUBTLEX-GR, a subtitled-based corpus consisting of more than 27 million Modern Greek words, and tested to what extent subtitle-based frequency estimates and those taken from a written corpus of Modern Greek account for the lexical decision performance of young Greek adults who are exposed to subtitle reading on a daily basis. Results showed that SUBTLEX-GR frequency estimates effectively accounted for participants' reading performance in two different visual word recognition experiments. More importantly, different analyses showed that frequencies estimated from a subtitle corpus explained the obtained results significantly better than traditional frequencies derived from written corpora.