For deaf and hard of hearing people, accessing movies requires the reading of the subtitles. Even though the subtitles are visually accessible, deaf people encounter difficulties when extracting the meaning of the situation, mainly because the learning of both reading and writing activities is hard for deaf people. The reading process involves lexical, syntactic and pragmatic knowledge, but also the ability to infer the meaning of a situation by using prior knowledge acquired from world experience.
Reading is more than a question of decoding words, mainly because there is a conceptual, executive and metalinguistic work (Courtin 2005), which needs general knowledge acquired through verbal communication from the youngest age. The limited capacity of deaf children to access verbal communication restricts the scope of their language experience, which, in turn, inhibits the development of their world knowledge, this knowledge being critical to extract the context of written messages (Niederberger 2007). In summary, reading requires constant application of prior knowledge to quickly understand new information, and deaf people are less able to use them automatically (Marschark 2007). The studies of d'Ydewalle et al. (1987, 1991, 1996) revealed the automatic behaviour of subtitle reading and especially the homogeneity of this behaviour for hearing people. Given the difficulties that deaf people encounter when reading, it seems relevant to examine both their reading and understanding of subtitles.
In a previous study (Grignon & Blanc 2008), we highlighted, with deaf teenagers, that the memory for subtitles was fairly good (66% in a recognition task for the original subtitles). However, the participants’ understanding of the subtitles remained poor. Precisely, their performance to an inference task was significantly lower when inferences were based on dialogues than when inferences were based on the images of the film. Deaf people are in a complex situation: they have to simultaneously process subtitles, faces and images, without additional information provided by the sound. Indeed, because of their deafness, people do not access the different accents and intonations in the voices of the characters. However, these are important contextual clues that allow the identification of the emotional meaning of a specific situation. Our aim is to examine through a new experiment how we could improve the access to character’s emotional feeling, this emotional information participating to the film understanding.

References
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d'Ydewalle, G., Van Rensbergen, J., & Pollet, J. (1987). Reading a message when a same message is available auditory in another language: the case of subtitling. In J.K. O'REAGAN & LEVY-SHOEN (Eds), Eye movement : From physiology to cognition.
d'Ydewalle, G., Praet, C., Verfaillie, K., & Van Rensbergen, J. (1991). Watching subtitled television: Automatic reading behaviour. Communication Research, 18, 650-66.
d'Ydewalle, G., & Pavakanun, U. (1996). Acquisition of a second/foreign language by viewing a television program. In P. Wintenhoff-Spurk & T.H.A.Van Der Voort (Eds.) Psychology of Media in Europe: The state of the art, perspectives for the future. Leverkusen (Allemagne).
Grignon, P., & Blanc, N. (2008). La compréhension de films sous-titrés pour les personnes sourdes et malentendantes. International bilingual conference: Audiovisual translation, Multidisciplinary approaches. Montpellier (France), 19-21 June.
Marschark, M. (2007). Comprendre et utiliser les bases cognitives de l'apprentissage chez les enfants sourds. Enfance, 3, 271-281.
Niederberger, N. (2007). Apprentissage de la lecture-écriture chez les enfants sourds. Enfance, 3, 254-262.

Paméla GRIGNON is a Phd Student at the University Paul Valéry in Montpellier (France). After obtaining a master’s degree with a thesis on film comprehension by hearing people, she chose to explore the mechanisms and strategies used by deaf people to understand the movies made for hearing people. The study of subtitles for deaf people requires a multi-disciplinary approach, grounded in experimental psychology methods.