Eyetracking the impact of subtitle length and line number on viewers’ allocation of visual attention

Compared to one-line subtitles, two-line subtitles are believed to receive more attention from viewers based on previous research. Yet, in the majority of these studies, two-liners are considerably longer than the one-line subtitles. The authors argue that the findings of the previous studies could have been affected by the difference in subtitle length, and there is a need to operationally distinguish between the impact of subtitle length and line number on viewers’ attention allocation. Therefore, an SMI eye tracker was used in this study to record the eye movements of 32 Iranian viewers while reading the Persian subtitles of a short segment of a feature film, A Prophet (Jacques Audiard 2009). The results showed that the viewers’ attention to one-line subtitles was significantly greater than the attention they allotted to two-line subtitles although they were of the same length. The attention allocated to the long subtitles was also significantly greater compared to the attention paid to the short subtitles. Retrospective interviews also showed that the participants favored short and two-line subtitles.