Bilingualism reading group

Speaker: Vera (Qianxi) Lv (ZheJiang University, Hangzhou)

Title: The Production Mechanism across Interpreting Types – Combining Computational Quantification and Behavioral Study Results

Abstract: Among the various modes of interpreting, simultaneous interpreting (SI) has been addressed by different authors as a ‘complex’ and ‘extreme condition’ of cognitive tasks while consecutive interpreters (CI) do not have to share processing capacity between tasks. Given that SI exerts great cognitive demand, it makes sense to posit that the output of SI may be more compromised than that of CI in the linguistic features. In keeping with our interest in investigating the quantitative linguistic factors discriminating between SI and CI, we examine the lexical and syntactic complexity and sequential organization mechanism with an inter-model corpus of transcribed simultaneous and consecutive interpretation. While previous studies on interpreting studies generally regard SI as an extreme situation of multitasking with the highest cognitive load, our findings evidently show that CI may impose heavier or taxing cognitive resource differently and hence yields more lexically and syntactically simplified output. In addition, the sequential features manifest that different task features mediate the sequential organization of interpreting output under different demand to achieve cognitive load minimization. We consequently propose a revised effort model based on the result for a better illustration of cognitive demand during both interpreting types. A series of experiments simulating both tasks with priming paradigm are conducted to testify these possible production preferences in both SI and CI. Possible strategies to reduce the production effort during both tasks are revealed.