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Media Accessibility Information, Guidelines and Research

Word Frequency in Captioned Television

Written by Carl Jensema and Michele Rovins. This paper states, "There are more than 500,000 words in the English language, but a person who masters the use of 250 words . . . will recognize more than two-thirds of all words shown in television captions." For people with limited reading skills, this is a great advantage. The list was created by taking scripts from the various television programs utilized in the study and combining them. Such words include: "the," "before," "around," "please," "yeah," and many others. The table showing the complete list of words is located on the last page of the article.


Word Frequency in Captioned Television

Tags: research, captioning

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