Local Cognitive Load In Simultaneous Interpreting

Simultaneous Interpreting has been identified as difficult,complex and cognitively demanding.Even seasoned professional interpreters would frequently find themselves unable to understand a source speech segment or render it in a target language.Performance problems arise not only in difficult situation,but also in speech segments in which no particular difficulties are identified.In light of the theories and empirical findings in cognitive sciences,cognitive load has started to receive attention in interpreting studies.Many scholars have probed into how SI works and why a particular phenomenon happens.The literature review shows that most researches are still experience-based qualitative ones.Within a limited amount of empirical researches,most existing efforts consider the whole speech as analysis unit while very little effort has been devoted to local cognitive load during simultaneous interpreting,and English-Chinese SI is largely ignored.The issues of relevance between imported load and SI performance,local cognitive load and SI performance,SI strategy and local cognitive load are still in doubt and of great necessity should be further explained.It is against this backdrop that this thesis sets out to an in-depth discussion on local cognitive load during English-Chinese SI.Based on the theories developed and evidences gathered in cognitive psychology and cognitive interpreting research,which included the Effort Models,the Embedded Processes Model of Working Memory in SI,the TBRS Model and the cognitive load theories,the measurement of cognitive load is presented,as well as an empirical experiment designed to serve to answer research questions.Text analysis has been made to explore further experimental results.Major findings of this study are as follows.First,the relevance of imported load has been refuted;further,it’s the load derived from the information of current segment held in interpreter’s working memory that significantly affects SI performance.Second,the local cognitive load and SI performance are negatively correlated;when cognitive load reaches up to 4,a significant breakdown on SI performance will be observed.Third,cognitive load appears to vary according to the change of SI strategies.Within the 4 SI strategies studied(i.e.,waiting,stalling,chunking and anticipation),the former three require more cognitive resources and result in higher cognitive load than the last one.More observations have been found in this study,that most of time in SI,professional interpreters work near saturation level.When encountering cognitive saturation or overload,professional interpreters would speed up or make some changes to the source information such as generalization and omission.