Development of a Dual-Modal Presentation of Texts for Small Screens

Abstract

Baddeley's (1986) working memory model suggests that imagery spatial information and verbal information can be concurrently held in different subsystems. This research proposed a method to present textual information with network relationships in a “graphics + voice” format, especially for small screens. It was hypothesized that this dual-modal presentation would result in superior comprehension performance and higher acceptance than pure textual display. An experiment was carried out to test this hypothesis with analytical problems from the Graduate Record Examination. Thirty individuals participated in this experiment. The results indicate that users' performance and acceptance were improved significantly by using the “graphic + voice” presentation. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications and limitations of the findings for future research in multimodal interface design.