Captioned television for the deaf

This study matched two groups of 20 deaf pupils on their pre-exposure knowledge of information contained in a televised film. Group A was shown the program, without audio and without captions. No gain in test scores resulted. Group B was shown a captioned version and their test scores improved significantly. Later Group A saw the captioned version and their scores improved significantly. Group B was shown the captioned version again. No improvement was noted. The results indicated that appropriate captioning does significantly improve the amount of information obtained from a visual presentation. Simple exposure to a picture added nothing to the knowledge gained as evaluated by multiple choice questions.