This article attempts to measure the cognitive or informational load in interpreting by modelling the occurrence rate of the speech disfluency uh(m). In a corpus of 107 interpreted and 240 non-interpreted texts, informational load is operationalized in terms of four measures: delivery rate, lexical density, percentage of numerals, and average sentence length. The occurrence rate of the indicated speech disfluency was modelled using a rate model. Interpreted texts are analyzed based on the interpreter's output and compared with the input of non-interpreted texts, and measure the effect of source text features. The results demonstrate that interpreters produce significantly more uh(m)s than non-interpreters and that this difference is mainly due to the effect of lexical density on the output side. The main source predictor of uh(m)s in the target text was shown to be the delivery rate of the source text. On a more general level of significance, the second analysis also revealed an increasing effect of the numerals in the source texts and a decreasing effect of the numerals in the target texts.
Cognitive load is a major source of processing difficulties in both interpreting and monolingual speech. This article focuses on measurement of cognitive load by examining the occurrence rate of the disfluency uh(m) in two corpora of naturalistic language: the EPICG, with specific reference to Dutch interpretations of French source texts in the European Parliament; and the sub-corpus of non-interpreted parliamentary speeches from the Spoken Dutch Corpus. In both corpora, the frequency per utterance of uh(m) was studied, in relation to delivery rate, lexical density, presence of numbers and formulaicity (i.e. the number of N-grams), as a Generalised Additive Mixed-effects Model: the frequency in interpretations increases with the lexical density of the source text, while it is inversely related to the formulaicity of both the source text and the target text. These findings indicate the maintenance of a cognitive equilibrium between input load and output load.
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