Evaluation of a Multilevel Linguistic Approach to Captioning Television for Hearing-Impaired Children

Hearing-impaired students who read at the second, third, and fourth-grade levels viewed five versions of three children's television programs. In versions one through three, captions were presented at different levels of linguistic complexity; version four was captioned according to an intuitively-based method; and version five was shown without captions. Students' comprehension of all three programs was higher with the captioned than the uncaptioned versions and in all three assessments, second-grade readers showed significantly lower comprehension than third and fourth-grade readers. Differentiation in comprehension as a function of captioning mode, however, was found for only one of the three programs. The pattern of results here revealed that as the linguistic complexity of the captions increased, students' comprehension scores declined. Implications for future captioning efforts are discussed.