L3 Conference in Warsaw

At the 7th International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism in Warsaw I presented a paper co-authored with Agnieszka Lijewska (that’s the Molkerei project we collected data for back in April). Here’s the abstract:

The influence of conference interpreting training on word production by trilinguals


Conference interpreters form a special case of language users because the simultaneous interpretation practice requires very specific lexical processing. Word comprehension and production in respective languages is performed under strict time constraints and requires constant activation of the involved languages (see Christoffels and de Groot 2005). Even though interpreters usually work in a bilingual setting, many of them are trilingual with A language (L1) and B language (L2) as active working languages (i.e. the ones from which and into which they can interpret) and with C (L3) as a passive working language. The interpretation training and practice gives language C (L3) a special status i.e. trilingual interpreters usually interpret from C (into A) but not into C. Research investigating lexical processing in simultaneous interpretion is very limited and most freqently involves only the two main languages (A and B). The results show that interpreters usually outperform other non-interpreting professionals with good second language command in such tasks as lexical decision, categorization, comprehension, language suppression and word production thus suggesting that the interpreters’ training and experience increases efficient lexical and semantic access (see Bajo et al. 2000, Christoffels 2004, Kujałowicz et al. 2008). The present experiment aims at shedding more light on the effect of conference interpreting traning on the word production in the process of trilingual interpeting. Participants of the study formed two groups – trilingual interpreting trainees and matched non-interpreting trilinguals. Both groups were required to verbally produce L1 and L2 translation equivalents in response to L3 target words presented visually under two context constraints – high sentence context constraint and low sentence context constraint. Participants’ naming latencies were recorded by a voice key and the performance of two groups was compared in order to test to what extent the interpreting training facilitates the production of words in a trilingual setting.

References:
Bajo, M.T., Padilla, F. and Padilla, P. 2000.
Comprehension processes in simultaneous interpreting. In A. Chesterman, N. G. San Salvador and Y. Gambier (Eds.), Translation in Context. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 127-142.
Christoffels, I.K. 2004.
Cognitive Studies in Simultaneous Interpreting. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis.
Christoffels, I. K. and De Groot, A. M. B. 2005.
Simultaneous interpreting. A cognitive perspective. In J. F. Kroll & A. M. B. de Groot (Eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1454-479.
Kujałowicz, A. – Chmiel, A. – Rataj, K. – Bartłomiejczyk, M. 2008. “The effect of conference interpreting training on bilingual word production”. Paper presented at Poznań Linguistic Meeting.