Analyzing Lexical Errors In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting In The Light Of Working Memory

Working memory refers to a human memory system that can store items and process information concurrently.Working memory span tasks,which consist of a word recall task and an information processing task,have been widely applied in various cognitive research.The listening span task was found to be correlated with the EnglishChinese consecutive interpreting performance.But such correlation needs specifying.The current study,aiming to find which type of word is more prone to errors in Chinese English-majors' E-C consecutive interpreting performance and if such result agrees with working memory,consisted of a listening span task and an E-C consecutive interpreting test.Subjects were year-three undergraduate English-majors from Hefei University.They all have passed the TEM-4 and been exposed to consecutive interpreting courses for one semester.49 subjects took part in Experiment 1 and 34 participated in Experiment 2.The current research examined the memory effect of nouns,verbs,adjectives,adverbs,prepositions and pronouns.Two hypotheses were made: 1)both tasks should manifest a concreteness effect,namely,concrete words should command a better memory effect than abstract words.Specifically,nouns should be best memorized and prepositions worst;2)a word type effect should exist in both tasks,i.e.,some types of words are easy to remember by nature while others not.The originality of the current study lies in the M score introduced to quantify the general memory effect of words in the listening span task.The result provided very little positive evidence to hypothesis 1 but lent support to hypothesis 2.Explanations and speculations were offered to account for the counterintuitive results found in this study,and possible avenues of research in the future were charted.