The Impact of Video and Subtitle Speed on Subtitle Reading: An Eye-Tracking Replication Study

Abstract

We present results of a direct replication of Liao et al.’s (2021) study on how subtitle speed and the presence of concurrent video impact subtitle reading among British and Polish viewers. Our goal was to assess the generalisability of the original study’s findings on a cohort of Australian English participants. The study explored both subtitle-level and word-level effects, considering the presence or absence of concurrent video and three subtitle speeds: 12, 20, and 28 characters per second (cps). Overall, most of the original results were replicated, confirming that the presence of video and the speed of the subtitles have a measurable impact on processing across different viewer groups. Additionally, differences in how native and non-native speakers process subtitles emerged, in particular related to wrap-up, word frequency and word length effects. The paper describes the replication in detail, presents the findings, and discusses some of their implications.