When I play a game for example, I turn the captioning on and mouse click past the characters speaking. By the time they have pronounced a word or two, I have read the displayed sentence(or two) that they are going to say.
Pertaining to the particulars of my personal expression of autism, I dont much like to listen to people speaking. But I know I read extremely quickly.
Today it occurred to me that the captioning is probably paced fairly typically for people to read along with the actor speaking.
So here we are at IMHO. I’m asking, though there is probably a bias for fast readers here given our predilection for textual amusements.
How does your reading speed match up to your aural processing?
Yeah Fuzzy, I’m confident that most people have the same experience as you. Some people may choose to listen because they feel it heightens their experience, or just don’t want to deal with the captioning. If I am ever in a position with captioning I always read it much more quickly.
I read much faster and that slow scrolling annoys the hell out of me …
Though I do love audiobooks, if it is one that I am familiar with. If I had not read the book yet, I cant listen to it, i need to read the book a couple times first.
Not quite, it’s not. It’s paced to be on screen for as long as the character takes to say those words, but that’s not the same speed at which people read. Most people read faster than they speak.
One of the problems when preparing captions is that you have limits on the maximum amount of characters on-screen and on the minimum time they can be there. The minimum time may be higher if the readers are expected to include children, people reading in a second language, or people with reading difficulties. In general, there are no actual regulations on this subject: there are collections of best practices, but the closest thing to a regulation is a Spanish norm (think ISO, but for Spain only).
So when you’re captioning someone who talks very fast, you need to cut off some of the conversation. I did a project on the close captioning of the pilot chapter of Desperate Housewives for Captioning class, and while most of the captions match the dialogue, for Carlos and Danielle they almost never did (IIRC, there was one case where the caption exactly matched what Danielle was saying). On the other hand, if someone speaks slowly, there is no problem with keeping the text on screen longer…
unless…
they…
talk…
liiiiike…
thiiiiis.
IME, often the people doing voiceover for videogames talk slower than the people in a movie (specially the people in a movie that’s been dubbed from English to generally-longer Spanish, where someone can be talking at normal speed in English and one mile a minute in Spanish because the dubber needs to talk that fast in order to get their text into the available time).
I read a LOT faster than I hear - which is why my perception of a push to video instructions and audio books chaps my ass. Why would I spend two hours listening to something I can read in one?
I’m sure that (practically) everyone on SDMB reads faster than the average person talks. I despise clicking on a link and finding a video of a news story rather than the broadcast transcription.
However, I do put an asterisk on that comment when it concerns movie/TV captions.
I watch a lot of television and DVDs with the captions enabled because
It helps me appreciate the script more.
My TV room isn’t the perfect audio environment that a movie theater is. Soft comments get drowned out by music, etc.
Characters often talk faster than I can follow the captions. The reasons are:
–Characters will talk over each other.
–There’s processing delay when switching from watching images to reading captions. You have to move your eyes to the bottom of the screen, read 12 words, glance up,and then back down.
This is really only an issue during an English language show. If I don’t understand the dialog then I’m not watching the actors faces as intently to see how their expressions match up with their words.
This. Not only can I read a lot faster than I can listen, I usually understand something better when I read it. Plus, if I don’t immediately understand something that I’ve read, I can just re-read the sentence or paragraph without rewinding (or whatever it’s called these days, now that we don’t actually rewind anything) or replaying the whole damn video. Same goes for answering machine messages…unless the message is actually urgent, if I can’t understand the callback number in three tries, I’m not going to bother with it.
Even in a movie theater, I’ve found that quite frequently the comments get drowned out by the music or sound effects. And a lot of actors either don’t know about proper enunciation or don’t care.
I can read faster than most people normally talk. That said, I have no idea how fast I can process spoken English. If you played back a recording at three times normal speed, it might approximate my average reading speed. But I have no idea whether I could understand it because I’ve never tried it.
It really depends. If we’re talking about instant-retention, I’m much better at listening. Vastly prefer to hear the directions to, say, a new boardgame explained to me rather than me read them all.
However, if we’re talking retention, as in I’m given instructions for how and when to take my parents’ dog out and what to feed him when, it’s best I write them down or have them written down for me.
Recording lectures in college helped immensely. I just listened to them over and over, rather than listen and attempt to take notes.
Pretty much everything on television is subtitled over here, and I find it incredibly annoying. It’s basically like having some asshole standing next to you telling you everything that’s going to happen in advance. All comedy is completely ruined; you read the punchline, then sit there and wait for it to be delivered. Totally kills the joke.
At least in videogames it’s just a silly waste of budget money.
Go and listen to a highly ranked high school debater. They speak extremely fast and average lay person judges are able to comprehend them. The human brain can interpret very fast speaking, most of us just don’t speak that fast.
Many years ago I did a paper on the visual cortex for a bioengineering course and found during my literature research that oddly enough some visual signals are routed to the same area of the brain that audio signals go into.
When you read the visual signal is converted into an auditory signal. That implies that since most of us read much faster than people speak it should be possible to hear and comprehend speech if it is sped up.
I added that to my paper and the professor got pretty excited about it and we discussed the design of a heterodyning circuit that would drop the frequency of a two or three speed voice recording to the normal speech range.
The bad news is that more research in the literature showed that another university had already had the same idea and built the machine. It was available back in the early 70s but I don’t know if it still is.
I did some checking and found that there is software that will speed up an MP3 file and reduce the pitch to normal. It’s called “MP3 Speed Changer 2.30”.