Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T02:06:06.987Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Coordinating comprehension and production in simultaneous interpreters: Evidence from the Articulatory Suppression Effect*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2011

CAROLINA YUDES ,
PEDRO MACIZO  and
TERESA BAJO
CAROLINA YUDES
Affiliation:
University of Granada, Spain
PEDRO MACIZO*
Affiliation:
University of Granada, Spain
TERESA BAJO
Affiliation:
University of Granada, Spain
*
*Address for correspondence: Pedro Macizo, Departamento de Psicología Experimental y Fisiología del Comportamiento, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Granada, Campus de Cartuja, s/n. 18071, Granada, SPAIN[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the capacity of coordinating comprehension and production processes and the role of phonological working memory in simultaneous interpreting. To this end we evaluated the Articulatory Suppression (AS) effect in three groups of participants, monolingual controls, students of interpreting and professional interpreters. Three variables were examined, the material to be studied (words, pseudo-words), the complexity of the articulations (simple, complex) and the articulatory rate (participants produced their speech at their own rate). Monolingual controls showed AS effect in all study conditions; students of interpreting showed AS effect in complex study conditions and professional interpreters showed AS effect only when they studied pseudo-words and produced complex articulations. These results suggest that coordinating comprehension and production processes in interpreters is mediated by the retrieval of lexical–semantic information and the distribution of the speech.

Keywords

articulatory suppressionsimultaneous interpretingworking memory
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 329 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by a doctoral research Grant to Carolina Yudes. SEJ2005-00842, by the research program “Ramón y Cajal”; and grant PSI2009-11094/PSI to Pedro Macizo, and by research grants EDU2008-01111 to Teresa Bajo and CSD2008-00048 Consolider Ingenio 2010; Proyecto de Excelencia de la JA-2007 and JA-2008_HUM 360 to T. B. and P. M.

References

Alameda, J. R., & Cuetos, F. (1995). Diccionario de frecuencias de las unidades lingüísticas del castellano. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo.Google Scholar
Baddeley, A. D. (1986). Working memory. New York: Oxford University Press.Google ScholarPubMed
Baddeley, A. D. (1996). Exploring the central executive. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 49A, 5–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baddeley, A. D. (2000). The episodic buffer: A new component of working memory? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 417–422.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baddeley, A. D., Hitch, G. J., & Allen, R. J. (2009). Working memory and binding in sentence recall. Journal of Memory and Language, 61, 438–456.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baddeley, A. D., & Larsen, J. D. (2007). The phonological loop: Some answers and some questions. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 512–518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baddeley, A. D., Thomson, N., & Buchanan, M. (1975). Word length and the structure of short-term memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14, 575–589.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barik, H. C. (1975). Simultaneous interpretation: Qualitative and linguistic data. Language and Speech, 18, 272–297.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chen, Z., & Cowan, N. (2009). Core verbal working memory capacity: The limit in words retained without covert articulation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 1420–1429.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Christoffels, I. K. (2006). Listening while talking: The retention of prose under articulatory suppression in relation to simultaneous interpreting. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 18, 206–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christoffels, I. K., de Groot, A. M. B., & Kroll, J. (2006). Memory and language skills in simultaneous interpreters: The role of expertise and language proficiency. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 324–345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daneman, M., & Carpenter, J. (1980). Individual differences in working memory and reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 450–466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daró, V. (1989). The role of memory and attention in simultaneous interpretation: A neurolinguistic approach. The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 2, 50–56.Google Scholar
Daró, V. (1997). Experimental studies on memory in conference interpretation. Meta: Translators' Journal, 42, 622–628.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daró, V., & Fabbro, F. (1994). Verbal memory during simultaneous interpretation: Effects of phonological interference. Applied Linguistic, 15, 365–377.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, P. M. (1992). Segmentation of Japanese source language discourse in simultaneous interpretation. Interpreters' Newsletter, Special Issue, 1, 2–11.Google Scholar
De Groot, A. M. B. (2000). A complex-skill approach to translation and interpreting. In Tirkkonen-Condit, S. & Jääskeläinen, R. (eds.), Tapping and mapping the processes of translation and interpreting, pp. 53–68. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, S. E., Pickering, S. J., Hall, M., & Peaker, S. M. (2001). Dissociable lexical and phonological influences on serial recognition and serial recall. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 54A, 1–30.Google Scholar
Gerver, D. (1969). The effects of source language presentation rate on the performance of simultaneous conference interpreters. In Foulke, E. (ed.), Proceedings of the Second Louisville Conference on Rate and/or Frequency-Controlled Speech, pp. 162–184. Louisville, KY: Center for Rate-Controlled Recordings.Google Scholar
Gerver, D. (1976). Empirical studies of simultaneous interpretation: A review and a model. In Briskin, R. W. (ed.), Translation: Applications and research, pp. 165–207. New York: Gardner Press.Google Scholar
Gile, D. (1997). Conference interpreting as a cognitive management problem. In Danks, H. J., Shreve, G. M., Fountain, S. B. & McBeath, M. K. (eds.), Cognitive processes in translation and interpreting, pp. 196–214. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Goldman-Eisler, F. (1972). Segmentation of input in simultaneous translation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1, 127–140.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldman-Eisler, F. (1980). Psychological mechanisms of speech production as studied through the analysis of simultaneous translation. In Butterworth, B. (ed.), Language production, Vol. 1, pp. 143–153. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hirst, W., Spelke, E. S., Reaves, C. C., Caharack, G., & Neisser, U. (1980). Dividing attention without alternation of automaticity. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 109, 98–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hulme, C., Maughan, S., & Brown, G. D. A. (1991). Memory for familiar and unfamiliar words: Evidence for a long-term memory contribution to short-term memory span. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 685–701.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hulme, C., Roodenrys, S., Schweickert, R., Brown, G. D. A., Martin, S., & Stuart, G. (1997). Word frequency effects on short-term memory tasks: Evidence for a redintegration process in immediate serial recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 23, 1217–1232.Google ScholarPubMed
Jones, D., Macken, W. J., & Nicholls, A. P. (2004). The phonological store of working memory: Is it phonological and it is a store? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 30, 656–674.Google ScholarPubMed
Lambert, S. (1988). A human information processing and cognitive approach to the training of simultaneous interpreters. In Hammond, D. (ed.), Languages at Crossroads, Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the American Translators Association, pp. 379–388. Medford, NJ: Learned Information.Google Scholar
Lee, T. (1999). Simultaneous listening and speaking in English into Korean simultaneous interpretation. Meta, 44, 260–267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewandowsky, S., Duncan, M., & Brown, G. D. A. (2004). Time does not cause forgetting in short-term serial recall. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 771–790.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liu, M., Schallert, D., & Carroll, P. (2004). Working memory and expertise in simultaneous interpreting. Interpreting, 6, 19–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macizo, P., & Bajo, M. T. (2006). Reading for understanding and reading for translation: Do they involve the same processes? Cognition, 99, 1–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Macizo, P., Bajo, M. T., & Martín, M. C. (2010). Inhibitory processes in bilingual language comprehension: Evidence from Spanish−English interlexical homographs. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 232–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Majerus, S., Poncelet, M., van der Linden, M., & Weekes, B. (2008). Lexical learning in bilingual adults: The relative importance of short-term memory for serial order and phonological knowledge. Cognition, 107, 395–419.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McDonald, J., & Carpenter, P. (1981). Simultaneous translation: Idiom interpretation and parsing heuristic. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20, 231–247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miyake, A., & Shah, P. (1999). Toward unified theories of working memory: Emerging general consensus, unresolved theoretical issues, and future research directions. In Miyake, A. & Shah, P. (eds.), Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control, pp. 442–481. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moser-Mercer, B. (2005). Remote interpreting: Issues of multi-sensory integration in a multilingual task. Meta, 50, 727–738.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murray, D. J. (1968). Articulation and acoustic confusability in short-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 78, 679–684.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Padilla, P., Bajo, M. T., Cañas, J. J., & Padilla, F. (1995). Cognitive processes of memory in simultaneous interpretation. In Tommola, J. (ed.), Topics in interpreting research, pp. 61–71. Turku: University of Turku. Finland.Google Scholar
Padilla, F., Bajo, M. T., & Macizo, P. (2005). Articulatory suppression in language interpretation: Working memory capacity, dual tasking and word knowledge. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 8, 207–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Papagno, C., Valentine, T., & Baddeley, A. D. (1991). Phonological short-term memory and foreign language vocabulary learning. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 331–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Papagno, C., & Vallar, G. (1992). Phonological short-term memory and the learning of novel words: The effect of phonological similarity and item length. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 44A, 47–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, J. T. E., & Baddeley, A. D. (1975). The effect of articulatory suppression in free recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14, 623–629.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romani, C., McAlpine, S., Olson, A., Tsouknida, E., & Martin, R. C. (2005). Length, lexicality and articulatory suppression in immediate recall: Evidence against the articulatory loop. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 398–415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roodenrys, S., Hulme, C., & Brown, G. (1993). The development of short-term memory span: Separable effects of speech rate and long-term memory. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 56, 431–442.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schneider, W., Eschman, A., & Zuccolotto, A. (2002). E-Prime user's guide. Pittsburgh, PA: Psychology Software Tools.Google Scholar
Shin, J., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (2002). Reaching while calculating: Scheduling of cognitive and perceptual-motor processes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2, 206–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, M., & Scholey, K. (1992). Determining spatial span: The role of movement time and articulatory rate. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 45A, 479–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorn, A. S. C., & Gathercole, S. E. (2001). Language differences in verbal short-term memory do not exclusively originate in the process of subvocal rehearsal. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 357–364.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Treisman, A. (1965). The effects of redundancy and familiarity on translating and repeating back a foreign and a native language. British Journal of Psychology, 56, 369–379.CrossRefGoogle Scholar