I participated in the 5th International Maastricht-Łódź Duo Colloquium on “Translation and Meaning” in Łódź where I presented the following paper:

Meaning and words in the conference interpreter’s mind – a semantic priming study of the bilingual mental lexicon

According to the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart 1994), currently the most prominent theory of the bilingual mental lexicon, meaning is stored in the mind on the language-free conceptual level while words are maintained on the language specific lexical level with separate stores for each known language. The interlingual links between words and concepts vary in strength depending on language proficiency and use. It is assumed that the specific use of languages by conference interpreters influences the organisation of the bilingual mental lexicon and lexical processing (Christoffels 2004; Christoffels, De Groot and Kroll 2006).
In order to shed more light on the influence of conference interpreting experience on interlingual lexical links in the mental lexicon, a cross-linguistic semantic priming study has been devised. The semantic priming paradigm has been one of the most commonly used methodology to explore the structure of the mental lexicon and it has been successfully applied in bilingual research.
The author will report on partial results of her COGSIMO post-doc project in which 24 professional interpreters working for the European Commission and the European Parliament and 24 non-interpreting bilinguals are compared while performing a lexical decision task. Response times to experimental stimuli in three conditions (semantically primed words, neutrally primed words, non-words) and two directions (English-Polish and Polish-English) in both groups will be compared to reveal statistically significant differences that may tell us something about meaning and words in the interpreting mind.