Vieira, P. 1 , Teixeira, E. 1 , Chaves, E. 2 & Santiago Araujo, V. L. 2
1 Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brazil
2 Universidade Estadual do Ceará, Brazil
Assuming that peripheral and parafoveal vision in the deaf plays a specific role during visual perception and processing of sign languages (Neville & Lawson, 1987; Proksch & Bavelier, 2002), this research aims at investigating the relationship between scene recognition and reading skills in deaf signers of Brazilian Sign Language. Following the variables investigated by Perego et al. (2010) for hearing people, we conducted an eye tracking experiment to analyze the influence of subtitle rate and linguistic segmentation on the reception of subtitled TV program by deaf. We manipulated the subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese for rate (145 and 180 words per minute) and for segmentation (well-segmented and ill-segmented phrases). 16 subjects, 8 deaf and 8 hearing, participated on this study. A large number of dependent variables were examined. For instance, we found a main effect for group (deaf and hearing) on the number of deflections between image and subtitle [H(1)=3,768, p<0,05], indicating greater speed in scene recognition by the deaf. And our main result was an interaction effect found on the duration of fixation between rate and segmentation type between the two subtitle lines [F(3,60)=5,1844, p<0.05], suggesting that the faster and well segmented subtitles are more comfortable for the deaf.