SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETATION AND THE RECALL OF SOURCE-LANGUAGE SENTENCES

Simultaneous interpretation is the act of transforming sentences from one language into sentences of a second language in a fluent, continuous manner. Although interpretation involves lexical substitution, and frequently the restructuring of syntax, these changes are not to alter the propositions conveyed. Jarvella (1971) showed that verbatim recall after listening to sentences is affected by syntactic boundaries: clause boundaries that coincide with sentence boundaries (in the surface structure) interfere with verbatim recall more than clause boundaries occurring within sentences. If interpretation proceeds via propositions, interpreters should perform similarly to listeners: memory for form will decline after propositions are complete (i.e. at sentence boundaries). This result should not be found if interpreters recode units smaller than propositions. We replicated Jarvella's result with listeners, and compared them to two groups of professional interpreters: ''interpreters'', who interpreted the text into American Sign Language (ASL), and ''transliterators''. In transliteration, ASL signs corresponding to English words are produced in English word order, thus forcing subjects to recode individual lexical items. Sentence boundaries impaired recall in all three groups, but less severely in the transliterators. For both listeners and interpreters, the transitional probabilities of recalling adjacent words were influenced by syntactic boundary; this effect was also attenuated in the transliterators. Both listeners and interpreters showed primacy and recency effects for the first and last words of sentences; transliterators did not. This evidence suggests that interpreters, like listeners, process sentences to represent their propositions, rather than to represent the form of the sentences themselves.