Poster #91 - Young Children’s Visual Attention to Subtitles During Cartoon Watching

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

Print awareness is one of the most important predictive variables to reading ability for young children(e.g.,Evans & Saint-Aubin, 2010). As a special type of print text, in spite of its usefulness, movie subtitles received little attention from developmental psychology and education studies. Previous studies had showed that paying attention to the subtitles at its onset was more or less obligatory and effortless, and the automaticity of paying attention to subtitles was already apparent with children in Grades 4 and 6( e.g., ., Bisson, et al., 2014; d’Ydewalle & De Bruycker, 2007; d’Ydewalle & Van Rensbergen, 1989; Wang, et al., 2012). But, how young children process movie subtitles under different subtitling conditions remains unclear. This study investigated young children’s visual attention to subtitles during cartoon movie watching, using eye-movement tracking technology. Especially, we sought to explore whether children’s literacy rate or the language of movie’s soundtrack had effects on subtitles awareness.
A total of 26 preschool children(age 5.64-6.58) took part in the experiment. There were 12 children(7 boys) with high literacy rate and 14 children(8 boys) with low literacy rate. The literacy rate was based on the percentage of word recognition that included in the subtitles. All participants were naïve to the purpose of the experiment and had normal vision. They were told to watch the excerpts of a cartoon movie under standard (English soundtrack and Chinese subtitles) and Chinese intra-lingual (Chinese soundtrack and Chinese subtitles) subtitling conditions. Participants’ eye movements were registered with the Eyelink 1000 eye-tracking system. And all participants needed to answer some questions about gist comprehension after movie viewing.
There were significant main effects of the literacy rate. The children with high literacy rate had longer dwell time, more fixations and larger pupil size than those with low literacy rate(F(1,24)=5.45, P <.05; F(1,24)=18.25, P <.001; F(1,24)=4.16, P <.05, respectively). There was a very significant main effect of AOI for pupil size. All children paid more attention to the image areas than subtitle areas, F(1,24)=31.04, P <.001. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between the literacy rate and AOI. In subtitle areas, the children with high literacy rate had longer dwell time, more fixations and larger pupil size than those with low literacy rate(Ps <.01); but there was no difference between them in image areas. However, there were no significant main effects of soundtrack. For percentage time in subtitles, children with high literacy spent more time in the subtitles than those with low literacy rate did, F(1,24)=10.31, P <.01. But there were neither significant main effects of soundtrack nor significant interaction between the literacy rate and soundtrack.
These results revealed that it was young children’s familiarity with print words that contribute to their paying attention to movie subtitles rather than their comprehension of soundtrack.

Authors

• Qiong Xia, Zhejiang Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Kejian Li, Zhejiang Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author