Simultaneous interpreting is generally assumed to be particularly demanding with respect to cognitive resources such as attention and working memory, which are thought to gradually increase with professional practice. Experimental data to corroborate this assumption is still rather sparse, however. Here we report an in-depth investigation of working memory capacity among 21 professional interpreters (experts), 18 second-year interpreting students (novices) and two control groups (20 multilinguals and 20 students). Tests involved either short-term retention alone; short-term retention and processing in a recall task with articulatory suppression, a listening span task, and a category and rhyme probe task; or attention alone in a unilingual and bilingual Stroop test. No between-group differences in simple span tasks and the Stroop test were found. Significant group effects were observed in free recall with articulatory suppression, in the category probe task and in the listening span task. The best performance was always produced by the novice interpreters rather than by the experts. These findings are discussed in relation to (a) the novice–expert distinction and the role of working memory in the development of interpreting skills, and (b) the nature of the task and possible strategies involved.
What to do with the various aspects of asyntactic comprehension ? From linguistic representations to cognitive resources. Asyntactic comprehension is a sentence comprehension disorder presented by some brain damaged patients. This trouble is characterized by a selective processing deficit of grammatical information. This review paper discusses the relations between three types of theories explaining asyntactic comprehension. Structural theories define the elements of linguistic representations that are not established in asyntactic comprehenders : these theories suggest a very specific deficit involving some syntactic elements (traces). Procedural theories define the psycholinguistic processes that are deficient in the patients : asyntactic comprehenders should have a deficit of the automatic processing of morphosyntactic information. Resource theories explain the comprehension deficit by a limitation of working memory resources that could result in a slowdown of activation and/or a speed-up of the decline of linguistic information : these theories are appropriate to explain the rapid decline of syntactic information in asyntactic comprehenders. These three theories are not incompatible : structural theories define the linguistic elements that require a rapid processing, and that are especially costly in working memory resources if this rapid processing is deficient. However, the results in favor of these theories should be taken with caution : for experiments, asyntactic comprehenders are often selected according to their expressive disorder (agrammatism). Some case studies suggest a dissociation between agrammatism and asyntactic comprehension.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.