Theoretical and methodological approaches to audio description

The paper presents an overview of theoretical and methodological approaches relevant for the research on audio description. A cognitive perspective is in focus - how we attend to, process, understand, and remember information that others convey and how we integrate information from various sources (including spoken language, written language, images, sounds, music, mimics and gestures). It is claimed that previous research on scene perception and scene description, mental imagery, multimodality, visual saliency and relevance can be preferably adopted in the study of AD. Both production - and reception-oriented perspectives on AD are needed. It is further argued that an interdisciplinary framework, integration of theoretical approaches and triangulation of methods is needed to investigate such a complex phenomenon as AD. This is exemplified by a study on AD of an animated film conducted at Lund University.