Video Captions Benefit Everyone

Abstract

Video captions, also known as same-language subtitles, benefit everyone who watches videos (children, adolescents, college students, and adults). More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video. Captions are particularly beneficial for persons watching videos in their non-native language, for children and adults learning to read, and for persons who are D/deaf or hard of hearing. However, despite U.S. laws, which require captioning in most workplace and educational contexts, many video audiences and video creators are naïve about the legal mandate to caption, much less the empirical benefit of captions.

Full text

Policy Insights from the
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
2015, Vol. 2(1) 195 –202
© The Author(s) 2015
DOI: 10.1177/2372732215602130
bbs.sagepub.com
Improving Society
Tweet
Everyone should turn on video captions; captions improve
comprehension, memory, and attention, for everyone.
Key Points
 Captions benefit everyone who watches videos, from
younger children to older adults.
 Captions are particularly beneficial to persons watch-
ing videos in their non-native language, children and
adults learning to read, and persons who are D/deaf or
hard of hearing.
 Captions generated via automated speech recognition
are not yet without interfering error, but when
auto-generated captions reach parity with human-
transcribed captions, technology will be able to har-
ness the power of captions.
 Despite U.S. laws, which require captioning in most
workplace and educational contexts, many video
audiences and video creators are naïve about the legal
mandate to caption, much less the empirical benefit of
captions.
Introduction
Imagine a technique that can improve children’s reading
skills (Linebarger, Piotrowski, & Greenwood, 2010), boost
adolescents’ written and spoken vocabulary (Davey &
Parkhill, 2012), increase college students’ attention to lec-
tures (Steinfeld, 1998), enhance second-language learners’
pronunciation (Mitterer & McQueen, 2009), and raise liter-
acy rates in developing countries (Kothari, Takeda, Joshi, &
Pandey, 2002). The technique is simple: Display captions on
videos.
Captions are like foreign-language subtitles; they trans-
late a spoken language into a written language (Garza, 1991).
Like foreign-language subtitles, captions appear at the bot-
tom of the screen. Unlike foreign-language subtitles, cap-
tions translate into writing the same language that is heard in
speaking, which is why captions are also called same-lan-
guage subtitles. Captions also translate sound effects (“rain-
drops falling,” “footsteps approaching,” “horses galloping”);
captions transcribe song lyrics, and captions offer other help-
ful clues, such as identifying conversational partners by their
name and indicating off-screen voices with italics.
More than 100 empirical studies, listed in the appendix,
document the benefits of captions. These studies report ben-
efits to a wide swath of participants as measured by a wide
swath of criteria: summarizing main ideas (Markham, 2000-
2001), recalling facts (Brasel & Gips, 2014), drawing infer-
ences (Linebarger et al., 2010), defining words (Griffin &
Dumestre, 1992-1993), identifying emotions (Murphy-
Berman & Whobrey, 1983), and of course, answering multi-
ple-choice comprehension questions (Hinkin, Harris, &
Miranda, 2014; Markham & Peter, 2002-2003; Murphy-
Berman & Jorgensen, 1980).
Eye-movement studies document that captions are read eas-
ily (d’Ydewalle & de Bruycker, 2007), attended to effortlessly
602130BBSXXX10.1177/2372732215602130Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain SciencesGernsbacher
research-article2015
1University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
Corresponding Author:
Morton Ann Gernsbacher, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1202 W.
Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
Email: MAGernsb@wisc.edu
Video Captions Benefit Everyone
Morton Ann Gernsbacher
Abstract
Video captions, also known as same-language subtitles, benefit everyone who watches videos (children, adolescents, college
students, and adults). More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of,
attention to, and memory for the video. Captions are particularly beneficial for persons watching videos in their non-native
language, for children and adults learning to read, and for persons who are D/deaf or hard of hearing. However, despite U.S.
laws, which require captioning in most workplace and educational contexts, many video audiences and video creators are
naïve about the legal mandate to caption, much less the empirical benefit of captions.
Keywords
captions, video, second language, D/deaf, reading, literacy

196 Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2(1)
(d’Ydewalle, Praet, Verfaillie, & van Rensbergen, 1991), and
integrated smoothly with the soundtrack of the video
(d’Ydewalle & Gielen, 1992). Standard verbatim captions are
as effective as more detailed or elaborated captions (Anderson-
Inman, Terrazas-Arellanes, & Slabin, 2009; Murphy-Berman
& Jorgensen, 1980).
The numerous empirical studies referenced in the appen-
dix demonstrate that captions benefit everyone who watches
videos, from younger children to older adults. Captions are
particularly beneficial to persons watching videos in their
non-native language, children and adults learning to read,
and persons who are D/deaf or hard of hearing, as illustrated
below.
Captions Benefit Persons Who Are
D/deaf or Hard of Hearing
The early 20th century’s golden age of cinema had created a
level playing field for D/deaf and hard of hearing viewers.
Silent films, with their interwoven screens of captions (called
intertitles), created “the one brief time that deaf and hard of
hearing citizens had comparatively equal access to motion
pictures” (Schuchman, 2004, p. 231). But in the late 1920s,
as talkies (films with synchronized speech) pushed out silent
films, the D/deaf community was shut out.
In response, the D/deaf community created captions
(Downey, 2010), 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 (as
“part of the post-Sputnik, cold war education boom,”
Downey, 2008, p. 193).
Captions began appearing on television shows in the 1970s
(with their earliest appearances on ABC’s Mod Squad and
PBS’s The French Chef; Withrow, 1994). In the 1980s, a hand-
ful of television shows began displaying captions in real time
(e.g., the launch of the space shuttle Columbia and the accep-
tance speeches at the Academy Awards; Block & Okrand,
1983). By the 1990s, captions on TV shows were mandated by
the U.S. law (Erath & Larkin, 2004). 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
D/deaf or hard of hearing. But early experiments demonstrat-
ing that captions benefit D/deaf persons demonstrated some-
thing further: Captions also benefit hearing persons. For
example, Figure 1 displays the results of a study by Nugent
(1983). More than 30 D/deaf children and nearly 100 hearing
children (9-14 years old) were randomly assigned to one of
four conditions: watch a video with audio but without cap-
tions; read only the captions; watch the video with audio and
with captions; or read and watch nothing, thereby serving as
a control group.
The children’s scores on a 23-item comprehension test are
illustrated in Figure 1. Statistical analyses identified two
main effects: a main effect of hearing status (hearing children
scored higher on the comprehension test than D/deaf chil-
dren) and a second, even more powerful, main effect of cap-
tioning. A lack of a statistical interaction between hearing
status and captioning indicated that captions were as
beneficial to the hearing children as they were to the D/deaf
children.
Several other studies demonstrate the same effect: Video
with audio and with captions leads to the highest levels of
comprehension, both for D/deaf children and for hearing
children (Anderson-Inman et al., 2009; Boyd & Vader, 1972;
Cambra, Leal, & Silvestre, 2010; Fischer, 1971; Gulliver &
Ghinea, 2003; Hertzog, Stinson, & Keiffer, 1989; Murphy-
Berman & Jorgensen, 1980; Murphy-Berman & Whobrey,
1983; Nugent, 1983; Steinfeld, 1998; Yoon & Choi, 2010).
Captions Benefit Hearing Children
Learning to Read
Even for hearing children, learning to read is a complex pro-
cess, which requires learning to map sound and meaning
onto text (Linebarger, 2001). Soon after captions began
appearing on TV shows for D/deaf audiences, educators of
hearing children made a striking discovery: Because cap-
tions explicitly illustrate the mapping among sound, mean-
ing, and text, captions could also benefit hearing children
learning to read (Adler, 1985; Kirkland, Byrom, MacDougall,
& Corcoran, 1995; Koskinen, Wilson, & Jensema, 1986;
Parkhill, Johnson, & Bates, 2011).
For example, Figure 2 displays the results of a study of 70
hearing children learning to read (Linebarger et al., 2010).
Second and third graders were randomly assigned either to
watch videos with audio but without captions or to watch
videos with audio and with captions. The children watched
six ½-hr videos, which were episodes of PBS children’s
shows (e.g., Arthur & Friends, Magic School Bus, Zoom).
As Figure 2 illustrates, watching videos with audio and
captions leads to significantly better reading skills. Children
who watch captioned videos are better able to define content
Figure 1. Data from Nugent (1983).

Gernsbacher 197
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 cumula-
tive benefits from watching videos with captions, for exam-
ple, cumulative growth in vocabulary both for hearing
children (Koskinen et al., 1986) and for hearing adults
(Griffin & Dumestre, 1992-1993).
Captions Benefit Hearing Adults
After discovering that captions benefit hearing children
learning to read, researchers investigated whether captions
also benefit hearing adults learning to read. They do
(Koskinen, Knable, Markham, Jensema, & Kane, 1995-
1996; Kothari, Pandey, & Chudgar, 2004; Kruger, Kruger, &
Verhoef, 2007).
For example, in the late 1990s, researchers encouraged
India’s national television network to begin captioning popu-
lar 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 (Kothari & Bandyopadhyay, 2014).
Even highly literate adults benefit from captions. For
example, when highly literate adults watch television com-
mercials that are captioned, they remember brand names better
(Brasel & Gips, 2014), and when highly literate college stu-
dents watch course lectures that are captioned, they remember
course content better (Steinfeld, 1998). Captions benefit hear-
ing adults, just as captions benefit hearing children.
Captions Benefit Hearing Persons
Learning a Second Language
Captions for D/deaf persons were co-opted from foreign-
language subtitles for hearing persons. In the early 1980s, as
captions for D/deaf persons became more prominent,
second-language instructors began re-co-opting captions for
hearing persons, to improve second-language literacy (Price,
1983; Vanderplank, 2013). Scores of studies demonstrate that
captions in a second language benefit hearing persons learn-
ing that second language; indeed, captions in a second lan-
guage benefit hearing persons learning that second language
even more than captions in the persons’ native language.
For example, Figure 3 displays the results from nearly
150 Japanese junior college and university students learning
English as a second language (Yoshino, Kano, & Akahori,
2000). The students watched three types of videos: videos
with English audio but without any captions, videos with
English audio and Japanese captions, videos with English
audio and English captions. In a fourth condition, the stu-
dents listened to only the English audio.
After watching each type of video (or listening to only the
audio) twice, in counter-balanced order, the students recalled
as much content as they could using either Japanese and
English. The students recalled substantially more content
after they watched the videos with English captions than
after they watched the same videos with Japanese captions.
In fact, after watching the videos with Japanese captions, the
students recalled as little as they recalled after not even
watching the videos (the audio only condition).
Captions (same-language subtitles) also improve second-
language learners’ listening comprehension. Figure 4 dis-
plays data from University of Southern California students
learning English as a second language (Huang & Eskey,
1999-2000). The students were randomly assigned to watch
videos with English audio and English captions or with
English audio but without captions. Watching videos with
English captions not only improved the students’ perfor-
mance when tested with a written comprehension test, but
also improved the students’ performance when tested with an
auditory, listening, comprehension test.
Captions benefit hearing persons learning a second lan-
guage, regardless of genre. Figure 5a displays data from 70 col-
lege students learning English as a second language, and Figure
5b displays data from 40 English-speaking college students
learning Russian as a second language (Garza, 1991). The stu-
dents learning English as a second language were randomly
Figure 2. Data from Linebarger, Piotrowski, and Greenwood
(2010).
Figure 3. Data from Yoshino, Kano, and Akahori (2000).

198 Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2(1)
assigned to watch videos with English audio and with or with-
out English captions. The students learning Russian as a second
language were randomly assignment to watch videos with
Russian audio and with or without Russian captions.
As both Figures 5a and 5b illustrate, watching videos with
same-language captions leads to significantly better comprehen-
sion. Captions benefit comprehension, regardless of the language
being learned (Russian or English) and regardless of the genre
being watched, from documentaries (The Sharks) to dramas
(Hoosiers) to animations (An American Tail) to comedies (The
Secret of My Success) to music videos (The Authority Song).
What Are the Policy Implications?
The empirical evidence is clear: Captions, also known as same-
language subtitles, benefit everyone who watches videos. More
than 100 studies document that captioning a video improves
comprehension of, memory for, and attention to videos, for
children, adolescents, college students, and adults. Although
captions particularly benefit persons watching videos in their
non-native language, children and adults learning to read, and
persons who are D/deaf or hard of hearing, captions also ben-
efit highly literate, hearing adults.
With so many studies documenting the benefits of cap-
tions, why does everyone not always turn on the captions
every time they watch a video? Regrettably, the benefits of
captions are not widely known. Some researchers are
unaware of the wide-ranging benefits of captions because the
empirical evidence is published across separate literatures
(deaf education, second-language learning, adult literacy,
and reading acquisition). Bringing together these separate
literatures is the primary purpose of this article.
Reaping the benefits of captions is also impeded by erro-
neous attitudes (e.g., Weasenforth, 1994). Many people think
captions are intended for, and therefore only beneficial to,
persons who are D/deaf. For example, in a survey of several
hundred K-12 educators across 45 U.S. states, almost all of
whom were experienced teachers who frequently showed
videos in their classroom, the majority had never turned on
the captions on those videos. The minority who had, reported
their students having reaped benefits from the captions
(Bowe & Kaufman, 2001).
Similarly, faculty and administrators in higher education
are unlikely to be aware of the benefits of captions for uni-
versity students, despite the fact that captions perfectly illus-
trate the fundamental principle of Universal Design. Like
curb cuts and elevators, captions were initially developed for
persons with disabilities, and, like curb cuts and elevators,
captions benefit persons with and without disabilities.
Indeed, the overwhelmingly vast majority of persons who
benefit from curb cuts and elevators are not persons with dis-
abilities, and the same could be true for captions.
The Institute of International Education reports that inter-
national students are enrolling in U.S. colleges and universi-
ties at an all-time high, a whopping 72% increase in only the
past decade. Nearly a third of the international students
studying in the United States are from China (Redden, 2014).
Given the increasing number of students in U.S. institutions
of higher education who are not native English speakers and
given the powerful benefits of captions to non-native speak-
ers, it would behoove professors to turn on captions.
Unfortunately, a primary reason that everyone who watches
videos is not benefitting from captions is that not all videos are
captioned. Despite U.S. laws, which cover many workplace
and educational contexts, many video audiences and video
creators are naïve about the legal mandate to caption, much
less the empirical benefit of captions. Some organizations rely
solely on automatically generated captions (e.g., the auto-
generated captions found on many YouTube videos).
However, as recent litigation (Orzeck, 2015) as well as empir-
ical data (Pan, Jiang, Yao, Picheny, & Qin, 2010) demonstrate,
Figure 5. Data from Garza (1991).
Figure 4. Data from Huang and Eskey (1999-2000).

Gernsbacher 199
captions generated via automated speech recognition are not yet
without interfering error. When auto-generated captions reach
parity with human-transcribed captions, further technologies,
including real-time captioning of lectures for all students (Bain,
Basson, Faisman, & Kanevsky, 2005), will be able to harness the
power of captions for the broadest population ever.
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Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support
for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This
study was supported by Vilas Research Trust.