The Experiment Study Of Memory Expertise In Simultaneous Interpreting

Simultaneous interpreting is a complicated cognitive process, which requires the concurrent listening and speaking, as well as supervising the output of target language. The cognitive load is higher than any other language activities. In this study, the construct of working memory was used as a theoretical framework to investigate the task of simultaneous interpreting. Address was whether experts and novices performed differently in simultaneous interpreting, a domain task, and in a general non-domain task that also used working memory resources for both the storage and processing of information.The purpose of the first experiment is confirming whether experts or novices differ in their performance on non-domain working memory span tasks, involving listening working memory span task and verbal working memory span task. The result shows that, there is no prominent difference in experts and novices, but in listening working memory span task, experts showed higher listening comprehension than novices.The purpose of the second experiment is confirming whether experts or novices differ in their qualitative and quantitative performance on domain tasks, involving how to allocate the resource of working memory, the require of memory expertise in simultaneous interpreting, how to use the strategies in the task. The result shows that, in domain task, there is prominent difference in experts and novices, involving the different memory in English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting and Chinese-English simultaneous interpreting. The experts have less articulatory suppression, and can allocate the cognitive resource in reason, at the same time, experts use more strategies than novices, involving prediction, supplement, compression and chunking.It could be concluded simultaneous interpreting was domain-special, showing the efficient allocating of working memory resource, getting over the articulatory suppression and using of different strategies to reduce load.