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Article published In:
Interpreting
Vol. 20:1 (2018) ► pp.1–32

The cognitive load of interpreters in the European Parliament

A corpus-based study of predictors for the disfluency uh(m)

| Ghent University
| Ghent University

Cognitive load is a major source of processing difficulties in both interpreting and monolingual speech. This article focuses on measurement of cognitive load by examining the occurrence rate of the disfluency uh(m) in two corpora of naturalistic language: the EPICG, with specific reference to Dutch interpretations of French source texts in the European Parliament; and the sub-corpus of non-interpreted parliamentary speeches from the Spoken Dutch Corpus. In both corpora, the frequency per utterance of uh(m) was studied, in relation to delivery rate, lexical density, presence of numbers and formulaicity (i.e. the number of N-grams), as a Generalised Additive Mixed-effects Model: the frequency of uh(m) in interpretations increases with the lexical density of the source text, while it is inversely related to the formulaicity of both the source text and the target text. These findings indicate the maintenance of a cognitive equilibrium between input load and output load.

Keywords: cognitive load, disfluencies, corpus-based interpreting studies, Generalised Additive Mixed-effects Models
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cognitive load: Definition and measures
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Method
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Analysis 1: Comparison of input and output in interpreting
    • 5.2Analysis 2: Comparison of output in interpreting and monolingual speech
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 26 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.00001.ple
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