A Study On Chinese-English Interpreting Learners’ Error Monitoring In L2Reading Comprehension

Language comprehension in interpreting operates on various linguistic levels, including lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse level. Researchers have conducted various studies on interpreting process, but gained inconsistent conclusions on the nature of comprehension process in interpreting, especially on whether interpreters develop more efficient strategies in processing lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse information during comprehension. Most of these studies followed an expert-novice paradigm, and little research has taken Chinese-English interpreting learners as the direct subjects and explored their language processing and comprehension strategies under the influence of interpreting training.The current study makes a tentative exploration in Chinese-English interpreting learners’linguistic information processing and comprehension strategies during text comprehension. Two experiments are conducted. Experiment One compares the performance of participants with different levels of interpreting training, while Experiment Two examines participants with different WM capacities. Two experiments in this study adopt similar procedure, wherein participants first performs an error detection task in which they read English texts and try to identify lexical, syntactic, and semantic errors embedded in the texts. After reading, their global comprehension of the texts is evaluated by a multiple-choice comprehension questionnaire.The results show that syntactic errors and semantic errors require participants to conduct deeper linguistic analyses and allocate more cognitive resources and attention. In Experiment One, advanced interpreting students detect more syntactic and semantic errors and show better global comprehension, suggesting that intensive training in interpreting can change the way in which interpreting learners process various levels of linguistic information and further develop more efficient strategies to achieve better error monitoring and global comprehension while reading. In Experiment Two, the results show that advanced interpreting learners outperform both high WM and low WM participants, indicating that large WM capacity can’t fully explain advanced interpreting learners’ better performance in error monitoring and global comprehension. It is more likely due to their more efficient language processing skills developed through intensive interpreting training.The present study verifies the horizontal view of interpretation. It also further refines Gile’s equation about comprehension effort during the interpreting process. The linguistic knowledge includes lexical, syntactic and semantic knowledge. Through interpreting training, Chinese-English interpreting learners tend to allocate more cognitive resources to syntactic and semantic analyses and further develop more efficient comprehension strategies. Such efficient strategies can generalize to within-language reading comprehension.