Movie subtitles improve foreign speech

NIJMEGEN, Netherlands, Nov. 11 (UPI) -- People who want to improve their second-language listening should watch a movie with subtitles in the same language the characters speak, Dutch researcher say.

Holger Mitterer of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and colleagues say subtitles in one's native language -- the default in some European countries -- may be counter-productive to learning to understand foreign speech.

The researchers show listeners can tune in to an unfamiliar regional accent in a foreign language. Dutch students showed improvements in their ability to recognise Scottish or Australian English after only 25 minutes of exposure to video material. English subtitling during exposure enhanced this learning effect, but Dutch subtitling reduced it.

If an English word was spoken with a Scottish accent, English subtitles usually told the listener what that word was and hence what its sounds were.

This made it easier for the students to tune in to the accent. In contrast, the Dutch subtitles did not provide this teaching function, and, because they told the viewer what the characters in the film meant to say, the Dutch subtitles may have drawn the students' attention away from the unfamiliar speech.

The findings are published in the journal Plos One.