Effects Of Working Memory And Input Complexity On English-Chinese Interpretation Quality

With the development of globalization,international communication activities are increasingly frequent.Interpretation is needed in many occasions and plays a more and more important role.In recent years,working memory has been a hot topic in language processing research.Many scholars have been devoted to the research of relations between working memory and interpretation,or the effects of working memory on interpretation from cognitive perspective,but many of them are theoretical reviews,and empirical studies are relatively few.And input complexity was seldom considered when studying interpretation quality.Based on this,this thesis aims to study the effects of input complexity,working memory and language proficiency on learners' interpretation quality,as well as the interactive effects among the three variables.The present research recruited 51 English majors who have taken one or more interpretation courses as subjects of the study.A working memory span test and two scripts for interpretation tests selected from Shanghai English Interpretation Accreditation Examination(Intermediate-level and Advanced-level respectively)were used as the materials for interpretation test,and subjects' scores of Test for English Majors Band 4(TEM 4)were taken as an index of their language proficiency.Only 43 of the 51 participants had complete and valid data which were used for statistical analysis via SPSS 17.0.The results show that: 1)input complexity has a significant effect on interpretation quality.The more complex the input material is,the worse learners' interpretation quality is.2)there are significant effects of working memory span on subjects' interpretation quality.The larger the working memory span is,the better learners' interpretation quality is.3)language proficiency has no significant main effect,but interaction of language proficiency with low working memory span is significant.The subjects of high language proficiency showed better performance than those of low language proficiency when their working memory span is at a low level.Based on the research results,the effects of the three variables on interpretation are discussed,and some suggestions on English-Chinese interpretation learning and teaching are proposed.Limitations of this research are also pointed out to provide some reference for further related studies.