The article reports the results of a mixed-method investigation of high-level discourse processes in simultaneous interppreting. The research analyses the effect of six variables indexing different inferential, shifting and integrative processes on the performance of expert and novice interpreters and identifies qualitative and quantitive differences in the way discourse processes are executed as a function of experience. The findings suggest that local coherence inferences tend to be successfully encoded by all interpreters; the process of shifting at macrolevel is equally executed. Differences related to skill variation appeared with integrative processing in the condition of high semantic density. The latter were attributed to the acquisition of task-specific skills and strategies by the experts (in the sence of Ericsson and Kintsch 1995), a finding corroborated by means of retrospective verbal data.