Abstract
We report the results of an eye-tracking study which used the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) to investigate the time-course of prediction during a simultaneous interpreting task. Twenty-four L1 French professional conference interpreters and twenty-four L1 French professional translators untrained in simultaneous interpretation listened to sentences in English and interpreted them simultaneously into French while looking at a visual scene. Sentences contained a highly predictable word (e.g., The dentist asked the man to open his mouth a little wider). The visual scene comprised four objects, one of which depicted either the target object (mouth; bouche), an English phonological competitor (mouse; souris), a French phonological competitor (cork; bouchon), or an unrelated word (bone; os). We considered 1) whether interpreters and translators predict upcoming nouns during a simultaneous interpreting task, 2) whether interpreters and translators predict the form of these nouns in English and in French and 3) whether interpreters and translators manifest different predictive behaviour. Our results suggest that both interpreters and translators predict upcoming nouns, but neither group predicts the word-form of these nouns. In addition, we did not find significant differences between patterns of prediction in interpreters and translators. Thus, evidence from the visual-world paradigm shows that prediction takes place in simultaneous interpreting, regardless of training and experience. However, we were unable to establish whether word-form was predicted.
Highlights
There is strong evidence that comprehenders often predict what they are about to hear (Huettig, 2015; Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016; Pickering & Gambi, 2018)
We investigated the time course of prediction in simultaneous interpreting by tracking the eye movements of profes sional conference interpreters and professional translators untrained in simultaneous interpreting as they looked at a visual scene and simul taneously interpreted English sentences into French
We explored the time-course of effects by running the model for each bin from 1000 ms before target word onset to 1000 ms after onset, in order to consider prediction and bottom-up activation of phonology
Summary
There is strong evidence that comprehenders often predict what they are about to hear (Huettig, 2015; Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016; Pickering & Gambi, 2018). Several studies have identified instances when interpreters produce a translation (in the target language) before they hear the complete source utterance (Seeber, 2001; Van Besien, 1999; Wilss, 1978), no study has measured predictive processing in trained interpreters and untrained bilinguals online during a simultaneous interpreting task. We investigated the time course of prediction in simultaneous interpreting by tracking the eye movements of profes sional conference interpreters and professional translators untrained in simultaneous interpreting as they looked at a visual scene and simul taneously interpreted English sentences into French. Despite the challenging conditions created by the concurrent pro duction task, both interpreters and translators would predict upcoming meaning. Time in profession (yrs) 16.92 ± 10.2 12.96 ± 10.05 (n21) French language
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