Effects of language level and visual display on learning from captioned instruction

It’s pretty clear that captioning — that is, displaying a transcription of the audio portion of a video presentation as printed words on the screen — is helpful for hearing-impaired viewers. A major concern, however, is that the captions are written in language too difficult for many viewers to understand. This study explored the influence of the language level of captions on the acquisition of pictorial information and two types of verbal information.