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Note-Taking In Consecutive Interpreting: A Psycholinguistic Perspective

Posted on:2009-03-16Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:L Q HuFull Text:PDF
GTID:1115360272963084Subject:English Language and Literature
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Note-taking is a complex activity that involves information comprehension, selection and production processes. The note-taker is always under time pressure to record what he/she hears while comprehending new information simultaneously. As such, it places high demands on the working memory. The present study investigated the sub-processes and functions of note-taking as a component of consecutive interpreting. In doing so, this study hopes to provide a reasonable answer to the following questions on interpreting that many students of interpreting have raised: why is the note-taking practice often different from textbook teachings? How does note-taking help interpreting?In this study, note-taking is viewed not as an interpolated skill as proposed by previous studies of consecutive interpreting, but a native part of consecutive interpreting. It is a complex process that incorporates input reception, input processing and production of notes. The input received, including both linguistic stimulus and contextual factors, is selectively integrated into the interpreter's long-term memory structure based on rules of competition and ongoing updating. Meaningful mental representations are produced as a result and reflected (often partly because of time constraint) in the final product of notes.One major factor that determines the result of input (or cue) competition is the availability of retrieval structures, which are stable, domain-specific memory structures that allow direct and quick (almost automatic) retrieval of information from the long-term memory. As the retrieval structures are results of well-practiced skills and rich domain-specific knowledge, they are available to experts only. In the experiments in which the dual-task paradigm was employed to measure the effort of note-taking, the professional interpreters were found to possess retrieval structures, while the students were not. The availability of retrieval structures explains why professional interpreters spend less effort on taking notes and beginning students of interpreting often find note-taking difficult and textbook rules on note-taking hard to follow: these teachings are very often abstractions of experts'experience, which may not yet be applicable to beginning students. However, experts are made. The experiment also showed that retrieval structures could be acquired with practice.A second major question explored in this study is the functions of note-taking, particularly how it enforces memory. Data collected from the experiment in Chapter IV suggested that taking notes helps produce a more complete and better-structured interpretation output, because it promotes an assimilative type of encoding–assimilating new information into the existing set of experience to form meaningful structures, as opposed to adding new information as arbitrary associations. Therefore, to achieve full utility of note-taking, one crucial condition must be met: a set of experience must be available. This finding coincides with the proposition of retrieval structures: appropriate domain-specific skills are essential.This study is a first attempt to understand from a psycholinguistic perspective the complex cognitive activity of note-taking, which has almost always been emphasized as indispensable to consecutive interpreting, but has not received equal research attention. By employing well-established test methods from psychological studies such as the dual-task paradigm and integrating research results from psycholinguistics, this study provides a new way to understand the"black box"operations of consecutive interpreting.
Keywords/Search Tags:note-taking, input processing, competition model, retrieval structures, assimilative processing, dual-task
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