A Study On Speech Breathing Characteristics In Consecutive Interpreting And Reading-aloud Tasks For Interpreting Learners

The current thesis explores the speech breathing characteristics of consecutive interpreting and reading-aloud tasks for interpreting learners.Previous studies show that the speech breathing characteristics are determined by the nature of speech tasks.In reading-aloud task,readers only need to read the prepared content,while consecutive interpreting task requires fast and accurate linguistic code conversion in a short period of time to convey the meaning of the source language.Thus,it is hypothesized that the speech breathing characteristics in the two types of speech tasks,namely,consecutive interpreting and reading-aloud tasks,might show different respiratory and prosodic features.Two groups of subjects were recruited in the current experiment:4 senior undergraduate students from English Department and 4 first-year graduate students from the MTI(Master of Translation and Interpreting)participated in the experiment.The respiratory and acoustic signals were acquired for Chinese-English and English-Chinese consecutive interpreting tasks(CECI and ECCI tasks,respectively),English and Chinese reading-aloud tasks by means of electromyography and respitrance bandage.The respiratory parameters of different prosodic units,the characteristics of non-breath pauses and the location of inspirations in different syntactic boundaries were analyzed to explore the influence of the cognitive-linguistic demands and the effect of language factor on the speech respiration for the two subject groups through quantitative analysis.The major findings of the experiment are as follows:(1)There is not significant difference in the speech breathing characteristics for the senior and first-year graduate groups in the same speech task.(2)Compared with the speech breathing characteristics of reading-aloud task,the proportion of intonation phrases is higher in consecutive interpreting task,and there are more non-breath pauses in consecutive interpreting task.The proportion of inappropriate inspiratory locations is higher in the consecutive interpreting task than in the reading-aloud task.(3)In terms of the speech breathing characteristics of the ECCI task,there are more prosodic phrases and non-breath pauses in the CECI task.Meanwhile,the duration of non-breath pauses is also longer in the CECI task.(4)However,the speech breathing characteristics of reading-aloud task is not significantly affected by different languages.The results indicate that different cognitive-linguistic demands associated with speech tasks have an influence on the speech breathing characteristics,which is reflective of different planning processes.Besides,the language factor has a great impact on speech breathing pattern when the speech task imposes high cognitive-linguistic demands.However,in the speech task which requires low cognitive-linguistic demands,the language factor has limited effect on speech breathing patterns.