This study in the field of cognitive psychology (audiovisual information processing) aims to examine the effect of language fluency and different types of subtitles (intralingual and interlingual) on film comprehension.
In a first experiment, we examine the role of interlingual subtitles in two experimental conditions (with and without French subtitles). The same short sequence of an English spoken film was seen by English-French bilinguals and French monolinguals. Different aspects of comprehension were estimated by a test just after viewing the sequence (images, dialogues and understanding of the situation). The results show facilitating effects of subtitling (in the native language) for the monolinguals and inhibitory effects for bilinguals. These effects can be extended to the different aspects of the sequence. In a second experiment, the most prevalent elements of the same sequence, both visual and linguistic information (from the dialogues), were used in the making of a new questionnaire concerning the understanding of the film. The test was submitted to the participants, who were divided into three groups depending on their knowledge of the oral language of the film (English). Each of these three fluency levels were shown three versions of the sequence (non-subtitled, with English -intralingual- or with French -interlingual- subtitles), giving six experimental groups and three control groups for which were combined the factors language fluency and film version.
The results indicate interaction of both experimental factors, implying a globally facilitating effect of subtitles for the beginner group (particularly when the subtitles are presented in their first language) as opposed to a distracting effect for the advanced group (more so when both known languages are on-screen) but no particular effect for the medium group. Moreover, these effects are not limited to the processing of dialogue information but apply to both aspects of film comprehension (linguistic and visual) studied in this work.
In a third experiment, we manipulated the language fluency once again (French monolinguals and French-English bilinguals) and used two types of interlingual subtitles (classical-subtitles in the dominant language- and reversed- subtitles in the non-dominant language). The comprehension test bore only on the linguistic information. These two conditions were compared with non-subtitled versions in the viewers’ first language. We will present the preliminary results of this last experiment and their interpretation is given in light of text and movie frameworks of comprehension and bilingual information processing.

Dominique BAIRSTOW has a PhD position in cognitive psychology from the University of Montpellier 3 (France). She studies the influence of subtitles and language fluency in film perception, comprehension and their effects in language learning. She has presented her work at different international conferences (International Congress of Psychology, Berlin (Germany), 2008; International Symposium on Bilingualism, Utrecht (Netherlands), 2009) and has submitted a paper in an international review of psychology.