Lexical category bias across interpreting types: Implications for synergy between cognitive constraints and language representations

Publication date: Available online 1 February 2020Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Haibo Jia, Junying LiangAbstractWhile previous results based on quantitative approaches to interpreting output have evidenced distinctive lexical, syntactic and language sequence features across interpreting types as a result of processing differences, none of them has probed into the lexical category realm. In this paper, the activity index, a normalized ratio between verb and adjective occurrences in the text, was used to capture the lexical-category-related patterns across output texts of three interpreting types, namely, simultaneous interpreting (SI), consecutive interpreting (CI) and read-out translated speech (TR). The results showed that the CI outputs yielded greater activity than the SI outputs due to lower frequencies of adjectives in the former. The discrepancy remained significant when differences in activity of input, text size and average sentence length were controlled for, suggesting processing differences as the chief factor underlying this lexical category bias. Given the syntactic priority of verbs over adjectives, the striking loss of adjectives from CI processing probably derives from “underestimated” cognitive demands in CI, which may exceed those in SI. Our research captures a lexical category bias in language processing under extreme cognitive pressure, and this biased language behaviour may reflect a dynamic adaptive mechanism of language representations to accommodate cog...

Source: Lingua - February 2, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research