Interpreters – experts in careful listening and efficient encoding? Findings of a prose recall test

Abstract

Research Questions: The purpose of the present experiment was to study interpreters’ recall of spoken prose. Design: The prose recall of simultaneous and consecutive interpreters was compared to that of foreign language teachers and non-linguistic experts. The professional experience of participants (21–24 participants in each group) was 10 years as a aminimum. The auditory presentation of the prose passage to be recalled, divided into eleven speech sequences, resembled the working conditions of interpreters. Data: Transcripted prose recall recordings were analysed quantitatively through an idea unit measure and qualitatively through meaning-based expressions. Findings: The foreign language expert groups outperformed the non-linguistic experts in both quantitative and qualitative measures. Additionally, compared to foreign language teachers, interpreters indicated a better recall of time expressions and topic sentences, as well as of complicated emotional and causal expressions. The explanation for these findings could indicate expertise-dependent tendencies: possibly a continuous practising of careful listening and the demand for a quick comprehension of the source text under the extreme time pressure of interpreters’ work leads to better results in prose recall. However, the findings can only be generalized to a limited extent because the prose passage used contained only one or two expressions of each type studied in the qualitative analysis. Originality: The study differs from previous studies in that the memory of interpreters, and especially of consecutive interpreters, was studied for the first time with a prose recall measure. Significance: The prose recall test revealed that the abilities of careful listening and effective comprehension of coherence and causality seem to play a significant role in explaining memory functions of simultaneous and consecutive interpreters compared to those of foreign language teachers and non-linguistic experts.

Taxing the bilingual mind: Effects of simultaneous interpreting experience on verbal and executive mechanisms

“…When participants must simply recall as many words as possible from a given list, no differences emerge between PSIs and UMs (Bajo et al, 2000; Köpke & Nespoulous, 2006; Signorelli et al, 2012; Stavrakaki et al, 2012). The same is true in comparisons with L2 teachers or consecutive interpreters, both for word lists (Hiltunen et al, 2016) and prose passages (Hiltunen & Vik, 2017). Conversely, when the task involves articulatory suppression (by repeating a predefined syllable during encoding), PSIs exhibit significantly better outcomes than UMs (Bajo et al, 2000; Köpke & Nespoulous, 2006).…”

“…That being said, note that other populations characterized by different intense forms of bilingual training/practice (e.g., translators, consecutive interpreters or L2 teachers) have sometimes been shown to possess performance levels similar to those obtained by ISs or PSIs. This has been observed for specific domains, such as vocabulary knowledge, word translation, picture naming (Christoffels et al, 2006), verbal fluency (Stavrakaki et al, 2012), WM (Stavrakaki et al, 2012), cognitive flexibility (Henrard & Van Daele, 2017), and recall without articulatory suppression (Hiltunen et al, 2016; Hiltunen & Vik, 2017). Although such patterns suggest that SI experience is not the only factor that could lead to (some of) the reported effects, they do not invalidate the claim that SI experience is directly associated with the reported enhancements; as it were, a relationship between factors A and Z is not falsified by evidence that Z is also related to B.…”

Discourse-Level Information Recall in Early and Late Bilinguals: Evidence From Single-Language and Cross-Linguistic Tasks

“…Though typically studied based on lists of disconnected stimulus lists ( Raman et al, 2018 ; Kilecioğlu et al, 2020 ; Macmillan et al, 2021 ), this domain can be fruitfully tapped through two naturalistic tasks: single-language recall (SLR) and consecutive interpreting (CI). In SLR tasks, participants are presented with pieces of discourse and asked to recount their contents as exhaustively as possible, in the same language ( Hiltunen and Vik, 2017 ; Prichard and Christman, 2017 ; Newberry and Bailey, 2019 ). For its part, CI requires listening to sequences of continuous speech in one language so as to render them into another language after a time period ( Hamidi and Pöchhacker, 2007 ; Choi, 2013 ; Liu, 2013 ; Wu, 2013 ).…”

“…Although these two tasks have informed several topics in the bilingualism agenda ( Hiltunen and Vik, 2017 ; Dong et al, 2018 ; García, 2019 ; Newberry and Bailey, 2019 ), no study has examined how AoA impacts on them. Yet, evidence from non-naturalistic studies shows that EBs outperform LBs in cued word ( Yoo and Kaushanskaya, 2016 ; Macmillan et al, 2021 ) and picture ( Volkovyskaya et al, 2017 ) recall tasks, suggesting that the same may occur in the face of unfolding texts.…”

“…Yet, evidence from non-naturalistic studies shows that EBs outperform LBs in cued word ( Yoo and Kaushanskaya, 2016 ; Macmillan et al, 2021 ) and picture ( Volkovyskaya et al, 2017 ) recall tasks, suggesting that the same may occur in the face of unfolding texts. Moreover, recall of discourse-level information can be influenced by expertise in specific bilingual skills ( Hiltunen and Vik, 2017 ), indicating that this domain can indeed be shaped by subject-level variables in this population.…”