Captioning

[Page 314]Over 100 empirical studies, reviewed in M. A. Gernsbacher’s 2015 article “Video Captions Benefit Everyone,” document the benefits of captions in videos. These studies report benefits to a wide swath of participants as measured by a wide swath of criteria: summarizing main ideas, recalling facts, drawing inferences, defining words, identifying emotions, and of course, answering multiple-choice comprehension questions. Eye movement studies document that captions are read easily, attended to effortlessly, and integrated smoothly with the soundtrack of the video. Standard verbatim captions are as effective as more detailed or elaborated captions.

Numerous empirical studies demonstrate that captions benefit everyone who watches videos, from younger children to older adults. Captions are particularly beneficial to persons watching videos in their nonnative language, children and adults learning to read, and persons who are deaf or hard of hearing.

The early 20th century’s golden age of cinema created a level playing field for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. Silent films, with their interwoven screens of captions (called intertitles), provided equal access to movies for deaf and hearing film viewers. But in the late 1920s, as talkies (films with synchronized speech), pushed out silent films, the Deaf community was shut out.

In response, the Deaf community created captions, first by recapitulating the intertitles of the silent film era and then by reconfiguring the bottom-of-the-screen foreign-language subtitles that carried U.S. films across the world. In the late 1950s, U.S. President Eisenhower authorized a federal Captioned Films for the Deaf agency. Captions began appearing on television shows in the seventies; in the 1980s, a handful of television shows began displaying captions in real time. By the 1990s, captions on TV shows were mandated by U.S. law. The Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 requires that captioned TV shows also be captioned when displayed on the Internet.

It is unsurprising that captions benefit persons who are deaf or hard of hearing. But early experiments demonstrating that captions benefit deaf persons demonstrated something further: Captions also benefit hearing persons. Even for hearing children, learning to read is a complex process, which requires learning to map sound and meaning onto text. Soon after captions began appearing on TV shows for Deaf audiences, educators of hearing children made a striking discovery: Because captions explicitly illustrate the mapping between sound, meaning, and text, captions could also benefit hearing children learning to read.

Children who watch captioned videos are better able to define content words that were heard in the videos, pronounce novel words, recognize vocabulary items (which may or may not have been heard in the videos), and draw inferences about what happened in the videos. Other studies demonstrate cumulative benefits from watching videos with captions, for example, cumulative growth in vocabulary both for hearing children and for hearing adults.

After discovering that captions benefit hearing children learning to read, researchers discovered that captions also benefit hearing adults learning to read. For example, in the late 1990s, researchers encouraged India’s national television network to begin captioning popular Bollywood music videos, which were sung and captioned in Hindi. The literacy of thousands of adults was assessed before the captioned music videos began airing and several years later. The literacy of adults who frequently watched the captioned videos increased at a much greater pace than the literacy of adults who rarely or never watched the captioned videos.

...