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Article published In:
Interpreting
Vol. 22:1 (2020) ► pp.1–34

The impact of simultaneous-interpreting prosody on comprehension

An experiment

| University of Mons
| University of Mons

Does the particular prosody of simultaneous interpreting have an impact on comprehensibility? This paper presents an experiment that sought to answer this question. Two groups of listeners (47 with relevant contextual knowledge about the subject-matter of the speech and 40 with less contextual knowledge) listened to the interpretation into French of a 20-minute lecture in German under two conditions (the actual interpretation and a read-aloud rendition of the transcript of the interpretation by the same interpreter) and answered comprehension questions. The prosodic features of the two conditions were analysed, and differences regarding the temporal organisation of speech, disfluencies, pitch register and the interface between prosody and syntax emerged. Simultaneous interpreting was found to be more monotonous, to contain a larger number of short and long silent pauses, more hesitations (“euh”) and more non-syntactic pauses as well as to have a more irregular speech rate. The read-aloud version was livelier, with more medium-length silent pauses and almost no hesitation. Results of the comprehension questionnaire do not demonstrate that interpreting-specific prosodic features affect comprehensibility to a significant extent. This is consistent with professional norms of interpreting in specialised conferences, where verbal aspects have priority over non-verbal ones.

Keywords: prosody, comprehension, simultaneous interpreting, quality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Interpreting quality
    • 2.2Prosody
    • 2.3Comprehension
  • 3.Hypotheses
  • 4.Prosodic and syntactic analysis
    • 4.1Method
      • 4.1.1Material
      • 4.1.2Prosodic analysis
      • 4.1.3Syntactic analysis (BDUs)
    • 4.2Results
    • 4.3Discussion
  • 5.Testing comprehension
    • 5.1Method
      • 5.1.1Experimental design
      • 5.1.2Hypertext and situation
      • 5.1.3Questionnaire design
      • 5.1.4Pre-test
      • 5.1.5Procedure
      • 5.1.6Scoring
    • 5.2Results
      • 5.2.1Gender
      • 5.2.2Age of participants
      • 5.2.3Participants’ previous exposure to interpreting
      • 5.2.4Note-taking
      • 5.2.5Comprehension scores
    • 5.3Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.00032.len
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