Reading native and foreign language television subtitles in children and adults

In the first part of the chapter, studies on attention allocation to subtitled television programmes are reviewed: Subtitles are processed automatically, with no major age differences. With remote foreign languages, switching the languages in soundtrack and subtitle (reversed subtitling) leads to less time being spent in the subtitles. In the second part of the chapter a new study is presented, focusing on word-by-word reading behaviour in subtitles. Less word-by-word reading occurs with reversed than with standard subtitling. With standard subtitling, more reading occurs with two-line than with one-line subtitles: Longer sentences are less redundant with the pictoral information.