Comparing The Inhibitory Control Between Postgraduates Of English Translation And Interpreting Majors: An ERP Study

Inhibitory control(IC)is intimately related to attention,working memory and language comprehension,and,to interpreters,it is an essential cognitive ability.A wealth of behavioral studies in cognitive linguistics have been performed to compare the IC among different groups of participants.However,few foreign and domestic ERP studies have compared the IC between interpreting and translation majors.For example,few ERP comparative studies have been performed among MTI(Master of Translation and Interpreting)students,who have received diverse amounts of interpreting and translation training for different majors.The purpose of this study is,based on the verbal and nonverbal Flanker tasks,to investigate the inhibitory control mechanisms of the interpreting students and the translation students respectively.In this study,two research questions are put forward in this study.First,are there any significant differences in the IC between the IG and the TG? Second,are there any significant differences in the IC between the incongruent and congruent conditions for the IG and the TG respectively?In this study,postgraduates majoring in English translation and interpreting(MTI students)from Beijing International Studies University were recruited as participants.Based on the verbal and nonverbal Flanker paradigms,both verbal and nonverbal tasks were designed in this study.Each task is divided into two conditions:congruent and incongruent conditions.Each condition includes two stimuli,and all stimuli are randomly sequenced.In this study,E-prime programming was used,and event-related potential(ERP)technique was employed to record and analyze behavioral and EEG data at the same time.Besides,the SPSS 17.0 was employed to further analyze them.The results between the IG and the TG found that,compared with the TG,the IG possessed stronger inhibitory control ability in both verbal and nonverbal tasks and exhibited earlier inhibition advantages in the verbal task in comparison to the nonverbal task.In the verbal task,compared with the TG,the IG possessed stronger IC ability.The interpreting students used the conflict monitoring to identify stimuli in the verbal task at the N2 time window,and then they could reasonably allocate attentional resources to suppress the interference of unrelated stimuli and prevent them from entering working memory.In this context,they could performdecision-making and resolve the conflict.Compared with the verbal task,the inhibition advantage for the IG appeared relatively late in the nonverbal task.One possible explanation for this difference may be that the participants of the IG have received professional training in interpreting skills such as consecutive interpreting,simultaneous interpreting and other interpreting courses in the university.The interpreting training and practices enabled students majoring in interpreting to identify stimuli at a faster speed,and they were,in particular,more sensitive to verbal stimuli.The results between the incongruent and congruent conditions found that,in both verbal and nonverbal tasks,the incongruent condition of behavioral results produced lower accuracy and longer response times than the congruent condition.EEG results found that,in the verbal task,the inhibitory control ability of the two groups of participants was reflected at the N2 time window;in the nonverbal task,the inhibitory control ability of the two groups of participants was reflected at the Early P3 time window.It was very likely that the sub-components of the IC involved in different tasks were different,or that they were involved in different tasks at different time windows.The simple effect analysis further exhibited that,compared with the nonverbal task,the IG and TG performed suppression processing earlier in the verbal task,and the TG required longer time windows to perform suppress processing in both verbal and nonverbal tasks.