Resumen de Movie got your tongue?: Effects of language switching on film reception
Xavier Aparicio, Dominique Bairstow
Cinema is in part a reflection of our society and, in these times of cultural mix, it is more and more common to find different language communities appearing on-screen together. Thus, it is not unusual to have to process (voluntarily or not) more than one language throughout the day. From a cognitive point of view, language switching is widely studied as it enables to observe interferences or facilitations across languages, modulated by an individual’s knowledge of those languages as well as by the orthographic proximity between them. Film comprehension is also studied, particularly depending on the languages used on-screen and those known by the viewer. This study proposes to unite both paradigms by using a multilingual film (English and Spanish dialogues), either with subtitles (English or French) or without, to analyse the effects of language switching on visual and dialogue processing, depending on the viewers’ knowledge of the languages provided. The results obtained in this study should increase our understanding of languages through an original approach.
