The Effect of Interlingual and Intralingual, Verbatim and Nonverbatim Subtitles on L2 Vocabulary Comprehension and Production

Abstract

The present study sought to investigate the effect of verbatim and nonverbatim interlingual and intralingual subtitles on L2 vocabulary comprehension and production. To this end, four groups of 30 language learners studying conversational English in two language institutes in Qazvin participated in the study. Each of the groups watched the same movie with a different type of subtitling: a) verbatim interlingual, b) nonverbatim interlingual, c) verbatim intralingual and d) nonverbatim intralingual subtitles. The participants also received a vocabulary pretest and vocabulary comprehension and production post-tests. Two separate Two-Way ANOVA procedures were used to analyze the obtained data. The results revealed that nonverbatim subtitles resulted in more vocabulary comprehension regardless of whether they were interlingual or intralingual, whereas intralingual subtitles were more conductive to vocabulary production irrespective of whether they were verbatim or nonverbatim.