Testing the efforts model of simultaneous interpreting: An ERP study.

Roman Koshkin,Andriy Myachykov,Alex Ossadtchi,Yury Shtyrov,Stefan Elmer

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0206129

Abstract

We utilized the event-related potential (ERP) technique to study neural activity associated with different levels of working memory (WM) load during simultaneous interpretation (SI) of continuous prose. The amplitude of N1 and P1 components elicited by task-irrelevant tone probes was significantly modulated as a function of WM load but not the direction of interpretation. Furthermore, the latency of the P1 increased significantly with WM load. The WM load effect on N1 latency, however, did not reach significance. Larger negativity under lower WM loads suggests that more attention is available to process the source message, providing the first electrophysiological evidence in support of the Efforts Model of SI. Relationships between the direction of interpretation and median WM load are also discussed.

Highlights

Unlike in monolingual communication, in simultaneous interpreting (SI) a message in one language is perceived and processed almost concurrently with the production of an equivalent message in another language
We aimed to electrophysiologically test the Efforts Model of SI [13,15,37] which predicts that working memory (WM) overload during simultaneous interpretation should decrease the amount of attention available to support the ‘listening effort’ and degrade the processing of the source message
Current WM load can be conveniently estimated if we assume it to be proportional to the size of lag between the source and the target, getting a precise behavioral measure of attention during SI would have been problematic

Summary

Introduction

In simultaneous interpreting (SI) a message in one language is perceived and processed almost concurrently with the production of an equivalent message in another language. The speaker, does not normally wait to move on to the utterance, regardless of whether the interpreter has completed the translation of the previous chunk [5,11]. It may not always be possible or convenient to maintain sequential linearity of the target message relative to the source. The interpreter may choose to defer translating a word until a good enough equivalent comes to mind, hoping to be able to work it into the target message later.

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