Dubbing versus subtitling in young and older adults: cognitive and evaluative aspects

Abstract

Empirical evidence on the cognitive and evaluative effects of viewing a dubbed versus a subtitled film is limited, theoretical views on the subject are mainly speculative, and age-related differences have not been investigated in this sphere. To fill these gaps, we carried out two studies contrasting the effects of viewing a dubbed versus subtitled version of the same film excerpt in young and older adults, using a comprehensive array of verbal and visual measures. The findings clearly show that dubbing does not provide a cognitive or evaluative advantage over subtitling. Moreover, subtitling seems to be more effective than dubbing in supporting the lexical aspects of performance. Finally, although older adults always performed worse than young adults on all cognitive measures, they did not show a specific impairment in the subtitling condition. The results support the view that subtitled films are processed effectively and appreciated equally by both young and older adults.

Is subtitling equally effective everywhere? A first cross-national study on the reception of interlingually subtitled messages

“…The study was meant to replicate part of a previous study (Perego et al 2015) conducted in Italy, and to extend it to Spain, Poland and Dutch-speaking Belgium.…”

“…These measures concern the evaluation of the hedonic aspect and subjective judgements of facets of performance that can be related to cognitive and evaluative effects. Materials, procedures and measures used in the study were taken from Perego et al 2015 and adapted; they also followed previous research on subtitled audiovisual processing (d 'Ydewalle and De Bruyker 2007;Wissmath et al 2009;Perego et al 2010). …”

“…Its pace can be termed "medium" (as operationalized by Lang, Bolls, Potter and Kawahara 1999;Lang, Zhou, Schwartz, Bolls and Potter 2000). Neither the gist of the story nor its visuals are either extremely easy or too difficult to understand and remember (as shown in the descriptive statistics in Perego et al 2015, where the same film had been used in experiments). Overall, the film reflected a common viewing situation of moderate complexity.…”

“…The structural, linguistic, translational and receptive differences of these two methods (Chaume 2012;Díaz Cintas 2001;Gottlieb 1994) soon sparked off a lively debate on which one was better (Díaz Cintas 1999). For a long time, this debate was encouraged by a series of speculative claims on the merits and the drawbacks of dubbing vs. subtitling based on intuition and rules of thumb, but seldom supported by systematic empirical studies (for a review see Koolstra et al 2002;Perego, Del Missier and Bottiroli 2015;Marleau 1982).…”

“…The subtitle effectiveness hypothesis (Perego et al 2010(Perego et al , 2015, for instance, resulted from studies conducted in Italy, where dubbing still prevails both on TV and at the cinema (MGC 2011;Chaume 2012). This hypothesis supports the idea that, for viewers living in a dubbing country and claiming to have a limited experience with subtitled programs, the activity of processing a relatively simple subtitled film is cognitively effective (i.e., it results in good levels of general film content comprehension, memory for film dialogues, and visual scene recognition), and it does not negatively affect film enjoyment and viewers' appreciation (De Bruyker and d 'Ydewalle 2007;Hinkin et al 2014;Wissmath et al 2009).…”