Birulés-Muntané J, Soto-Faraco S
Department de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions, Cognition and Brain Centre, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain.
PLoS One. 2016 Jun 29;11(6):e0158409. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0158409. eCollection 2016.
Watching English-spoken films with subtitles is becoming increasingly popular throughout the world. One reason for this trend is the assumption that perceptual learning of the sounds of a foreign language, English, will improve perception skills in non-English speakers. Yet, solid proof for this is scarce. In order to test the potential learning effects derived from watching subtitled media, a group of intermediate Spanish students of English as a foreign language watched a 1h-long episode of a TV drama in its original English version, with English, Spanish or no subtitles overlaid. Before and after the viewing, participants took a listening and vocabulary test to evaluate their speech perception and vocabulary acquisition in English, plus a final plot comprehension test. The results of the listening skills tests revealed that after watching the English subtitled version, participants improved these skills significantly more than after watching the Spanish subtitled or no-subtitles versions. The vocabulary test showed no reliable differences between subtitled conditions. Finally, as one could expect, plot comprehension was best under native, Spanish subtitles. These learning effects with just 1 hour exposure might have major implications with longer exposure times.
观看带字幕的英语电影在全球越来越受欢迎。这种趋势的一个原因是人们认为，通过感知学习外语（英语）的发音，非英语母语者的感知技能会得到提高。然而，这方面的可靠证据却很少。为了测试观看带字幕媒体所产生的潜在学习效果，一组中级水平的以英语为外语的西班牙学生观看了一集时长1小时的英语原版电视剧，分别覆盖英语、西班牙语字幕或无字幕。观看前后，参与者进行了听力和词汇测试，以评估他们的英语语音感知和词汇习得情况，另外还有一项最终的情节理解测试。听力技能测试结果显示，观看英文字幕版后，参与者在这些技能上的提高明显大于观看西班牙文字幕版或无字幕版之后。词汇测试表明，不同字幕条件下没有可靠的差异。最后，正如人们所预期的，在母语（西班牙语）字幕下情节理解最好。仅1小时的接触所产生的这些学习效果，在接触时间更长的情况下可能会有重大影响。
