Simultaneous interpreting is a complex bilingual verbal activity that involves the auditory perception of an oral communication and the production of a coherent discourse. One of the cognitive functions underlying simultaneous interpreting is working memory. The aim of this work was to study the relationship between expertise, working memory capacity and articulatory suppression effect, and the...

This paper attempts to combine interpreting studies with working memory research and propose a theoretical framework for the process model of simultaneous interpreting. First, the embedded model of working memory by Cowan is introduced as the most promising model to account for various phenomena of simultaneous interpreting. This is followed by a description of the functions of components of th...

Mariachiara Russo is an associate professor at the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori) in Forlí, Italy, a campus of the University of Bologna. As a graduate of the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators at the University of Trieste in Italy, Prof. Russo began her profe...

Interpreting is generally recognized as a particularly demanding language processing task for the cognitive system. Dependency distance, the linear distance between two syntactically related words in a sentence, is an index of sentence complexity and is also able to reflect the cognitive constraints during various tasks. In the current research, we examine the difference in dependency distance ...

This study aimed to explore non-verbal executive processes in simultaneous interpreters. Simultaneous interpreters, bilinguals without any training in simultaneous interpreting, and control monolinguals performed the Wisconsin card sorting task (WCST; Experiment 1) and the Simon task (Experiment 2). Performance on WCST was thought to index cognitive flexibility while Simon task performance was ...