Incidental vocabulary learning through captioned audiovisual material: an eye-tracking study

By using eye-tracking methodologies, the present study seeks to measure possible incidental vocabulary gains by comparing 5 different captioning conditions appearing on a video type documentary in Spanish. For those purposes, 35 undergraduate Spanish language learners from Texas Tech University were pseudo-randomly assigned to one of the 5 different captioning conditions: Full Captions, Full Captions + Enhanced Keyword, Just Keyword, Just Enhanced Keyword, and No Captions. The audiovisual material the participants were exposed to consisted of a 5-minutes documentary about wolves living in the Yellowstone Park called “El Legado del Lobo Negro” (The Legacy of the Black Wolf) narrated in Spanish. The present study is mainly based on Montero-Perez et al. (2015) which analyzed the effects of visual enhancement techniques, the role of captions, possible vocabulary gains, and the use of eye-tracking methodologies. In this line, the present study added the condition “Just Enhanced Keyword” to measure the effects of textual enhancement techniques and their attention-grabbing capabilities. Furthermore, in order to measure possible vocabulary gains, participants were exposed to pretests and posttests, a form recall, and a meaning recall test.
The results of this study showed that neither the type of captioning nor the textual enhancement techniques produced significant statistical relationships with vocabulary learning/acquisition. However, there were some significant correlations in terms of Comprehension and PostTest, Meaning Recall and PostTest, and Form Recall and Mean Dwell Time. The results of this study give insights in terms of the importance of video length, number of videos, number of participants, and the comprehensibility of the audiovisual materials.