Abstract
TED Talks are widely used for English Education today. One practical reason is that English subtitles are available for free. There is a guideline for creating subtitles so that the audience of the TED video can easily understand the message in terms of the human cognitive load of recognizing alphabet letters at one time during watching video talks. In this study the authors attempted to analyze the display time of subtitles from 2,143 TED Talks videos which include 577,457 subtitles in order to clarify the characteristics of their distribution and mean time length. We then discuss the result compared with the above guideline for the limitation of linguistic information in the subtitles. The result shows that the mean length is 2.8 seconds with 1.0 standard deviation and a logarithmic normal distribution. The distribution indicates a similar phenomenon to our previous study which analyzed the length of breath groups observed in an English movie corpus named Seleaf. We also discuss the educational use and precaution of TED subtitles in the language classroom with ICT settings.
