Long-Term Memory In Consecutive Interpretation-A Cognitive Approach

Cognitive psychology is a young social science emerging in the middle of the 1950s, which mainly studies such psychological or cognitive processes as sense, attention, mental image, memory, thinking and speech. Cognitive psychology has so far made great advances and begun to exert its influence on other fields. Daniel Gile's"the effort model", a universally recognized and widely adopted model in the circle of interpretation, draws on the researches into"attention"in cognitive psychology, and in particular, draws on Kahneman's"energy assignment pattern".Daniel Gile's"the effort model"is an excellent model which combines the findings of cognitive psychology with those of interpretation studies. The author is convinced that interpretation studies merely based on personal experiences are increasingly hard to find their scientific values and are out of date; that interpretation studies based on the theoretical framework of linguistics and culture have limited space to expand and are lack of scientific elements; and that cognitive psychology has opened up and will continue to open up an entirely new and broader horizon for interpretation studies.The introduction part of the paper deals mainly with the relevance of cognitive psychology to interpretation, the types of memory in language processing, the respective functions of and the interrelationships among sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory as well as the role of memory in language processing. The second part of the paper is a close cognitive study of long-term memory, which starts with the definition of cognition and mainly introduces the semantic storage of long-term memory and the Collins and Quillian's network model in particular. The author devotes major efforts to the third part: the role of long-term memory in interpreting process where the author attempts to explore the complete process of interpreting from a cognitive psychological perspective, including recognizing input information, facilitating understanding, aiding prediction and helping reproduction. The author, in the last part of the paper, uses an example of interpreting business negotiation to indicate the importance of long-term memory in the interpreting process, including his knowledge of bilingual vocabulary, grammar and sentence patterns as well as anti-pressure ability, field knowledge and cultural awareness.Interpretation studies should bravely adopt findings in other fields and explore the interpreting process from a completely new perspective. To the author's regret, interpretation studies have never kept in pace with the studies of cognitive psychology during the past decades. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to encourage more and more scholars to explore interpreting phenomenon and process in a cognitive approach.