Sous-titrage, compréhension de films et acquisition de vocabulaire

Abstract

A growing number of studies are investigating the cognitive processes involved in movie comprehension (Zacks & Magliano, 2010). Some of them focus on the influence of different languages (in the dialogues or used as subtitles) on screen (Lavaur & Bairstow, 2011), but also the way in which viewers can use subtitled films to develop their knowledge of another language and acquire new vocabulary (Mitterer & Mac Queen, 2009). This study sets out to estimate the relative effects of different types of subtitles (classical and reversed) on film comprehension (mainly the dialogue information) and lexical retrieval, in comparison to two control versions of the film (original and dubbed versions without subtitles). Classic (or standard) subtitling is the most common on television and at the cinema (dialogues in the viewer's non dominant language and subtitles in the dominant language), whereas reversed subtitling is the opposite (dialogues in the dominant language, subtitles in the non dominant language). A short movie extract containing little action was selected to allow the viewer to mainly concentrate on the dialogues. Four different versions were prepared, the original (L2 English) and dubbed (L1 French) versions, both with and without subtitles. These were presented to native French speakers with a medium-to-low knowledge of English, divided into four groups (each seeing only one of the versions). After viewing the film, these last were asked to answer a comprehension questionnaire concerning verbal information found in the film (dialogues). In a second phase, the participants were asked to watch the same version of the sequence as the first phase and then complete a sentence completion task using a lexical retrieval process (dialogue extracts in English L2 – missing one word). Results seem to indicate a positive effect of subtitles on comprehension scores and a better lexical retrieval with reversed subtitles (dialogues in the L1 – dominant language – and subtitles in L2). These findings could prove to be a useful basis for movie comprehension, bilingual memory and language learning studies.