Does the dubbing effect apply to voice-over? A conceptual replication study on visual attention and immersion

Abstract

In an eye-tracking study, Romero-Fresco (2016) discovered that when watching a dubbed film, Spanish viewers hardly looked at characters’ mouths and focussed instead on their eyes – a phenomenon he termed ‘the dubbing effect’. Our study is a conceptual replication of Romero-Fresco’s study, aimed at answering the question of whether a similar effect also takes place in voice-over: do viewers avoid looking at characters’ mouths to stay immersed in the film story? With this question in mind, we tested 35 Polish native speakers watching a 6-minute voiced-over excerpt from Casablanca while their eyes were monitored with an eye tracker. We also measured viewers’ immersion levels as well as their enjoyment and comprehension. In this paper, we present two experiments. In Experiment 1, by analysing viewers’ gaze behaviour and immersion levels, we found that Polish viewers did not avoid looking at characters’ mouths. In Experiment 2, we compared our results with those obtained in the original study with Spanish and English viewers. We found that visual attention distribution in Polish voice-over resembled the one observed in English viewers, who watched the film with the original soundtrack. Both Polish and English viewers spent more time looking at characters’ eyes in scenes with no dialogue compared to scenes with dialogue, as opposed to the Spanish people for whom the tendency was reversed.