The present study set out to find the neural correlates of language anticipation in interpreters, identify whether interpreters with different levels of expertise anticipated differently, and elucidate the sentence comprehension process of interpreters of different levels of expertise.
The Professionals’ attenuated N400 to congruent stimuli seemed to signal the underlying process of language anticipation. The attenuated N400 to the congruent target item resulted in a significantly larger congruity effect in the left hemisphere of Professionals than of Students. Left hemisphere processing has been proposed to be more “biased toward semantic feature pre-activation via top-down cues” (Kutas et al., 2011, p. 199), so it is possible that the Professionals made better use of the contextual cues to anticipate the upcoming target. In addition, the attenuated N400 also
suggested that it was much easier for the Professionals to access the target item. The Professionals have acquired the skill or habit of recruiting potentially useful cues to anticipate upcoming information. Through many years of practice on the job, this process of identifying potentially useful cues then recruiting them to predict
upcoming information may have become an automated mechanism. In addition, since the target items used in the present experiment were high cloze probability terms to the sentences designed, the retrieval cues to these lexical items built throughout the years of experiences have probably formed a rich and intricate
retrieval structure. This was why lexical access to the highly predictable terms could have been an automated process.
The PNP component in the congruent conditions may also be a biological marker for language anticipation: the Professionals generated more positive amplitude in the
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congruent conditions than in incongruent conditions, while Students produced a more typical N400/PNP biphasic pattern found in previous studies, in which the mean amplitudes of the incongruent condition were more positive. The averaged waveform pattern for Graduates suggests that they are in the process of migrating from Students to Professionals. As mentioned previously, the attenuated N400 in Professionals might signal automating lexical access, which freed up valuable cognitive resources to higher-level cognitive tasks such as formulating fine-tuned mental representations that allowed further linguistic processing.
The ERP pattern differences point to the possibility that interpreters with different levels of expertise anticipate differently, and their sentence comprehension processes might also be different. Anticipation of a lexical item of high frequency from contextual cues that are not specific to a professional domain (i.e. pertaining to general knowledge) seemed to have become an automated process for experienced interpreters. It is therefore possible that were they to process linguistic inputs that pertain to knowledge domains with which they are unfamiliar, interpreters do not possess an automated anticipation mechanism. Ericsson and Kintsch (1995) used text comprehension to point out that when there is a lack of domain knowledge for an adequate situational understanding, the retrieval structures that provide access to the encoded information will not exist, hence no anticipation will take place. De Bot (2000) also pointed out that the ability to anticipate hinges upon previous knowledge.
Whether or not these findings and proposed explanations shed light on the way anticipation could be taught remains to be explored. It was unclear whether or not the current stimulus design would produce ERP effects similar to those seen in
previous literature, for example, designs that revealed the EEG signs of prediction that preceded the target item that was presumably being predicted (e.g. gender markers in Otten et al., 2007 and indefinite articles in De Long et al., 2005). A possible design
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that could be used in future studies is to manipulate Chinese classifiers, which are bound morphemes to a noun or another content word. In addition, designs that manipulate the expectancy (i.e. cloze probability) of congruent target items to highly constraining contexts could more clearly elucidate the anticipation mechanism in interpreters. The between-category (e.g. gondola/helicopter) versus within-category (e.g. gondola/ferry) manipulation used in Federmeier and Kutas (1999a) could also be beneficial. Instead of using a sentence pair to create a context, short stories
comprising of more sentences could produce a more sophisticated discourse which would more closely resemble the working condition of interpreters. However, this would pose a greater challenge to the control of all sorts of potentially confounding variables of the experiment materials.
Despite efforts to control all aspects of experiment materials used in this study, there were still some flaws. One critical issue was with the range of cloze
probability, which varied from around 0.5 to 1. Although mean cloze probability was high (around 0.8), the variation could have resulted in unclear distinctions between anterior and posterior positivities. In addition, although the LSA has been used in previous studies to gauge contextual constraint, the data in the Chinese LSA Website used in the present study was not very comprehensive, resulting in
counter-intuitive cosines or null data. Using independent raters to judge all stimuli sentences could have provided additional input to better control the contextual constraint. The counterbalance requirement across congruent versus incongruent and Chinese versus English conditions posed major challenges during the design of the sentences. Linguistic (especially syntactic) and cultural differences sometimes resulted in discrepancies in the semantic emphasis of the context, which was probably reflected in the gap between the cloze probabilities. Future studies could obtain clearer or more significant results by designing less complicated and ambitious
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experiment materials, for example, by manipulating code-switching at the word instead of sentence level.
Another issue is that of ecological validity. This has long been an impediment to laboratory experiments in interpreting studies. Since domain expertise is said to be non-transferrable (Feltovich et al., 2006), whether or not the Professionals in the present study actually comprehended the experiment stimuli in the same way they would in an interpreting booth is unclear. After all, the task was to judge the logicality of the sentences, not to interpret them into another language. In addition, the large standard deviations found in the data could be potentially problematic, as they would lead to premature and incorrect interpretations of the results. Such large standard deviations invariably led to insignificant p values in the t-tests and ANOVAs, although visual inspection of the waveforms often suggested otherwise. It was difficult to pinpoint the source of such large standard deviations. They could have been the result of methodological glitches during data capture and data processing, as this was the first ERP study the experimenter has ever conducted. On the other hand, they could simply reflect the idiosyncrasies of the subjects, especially those in the Professionals group.
Despite these methodological shortcomings, it is hoped that the results from the present study demonstrated the possibility that interpreters of different levels of
expertise used anticipation to different degrees in the sentence comprehension process.
It is also hoped that the present study demonstrated the possibility that a professional interpreter by training could begin to learn to leverage brain imaging techniques to explore certain aspects of language interpreting. Although this could prove to be more daunting a task than interpreting per se, it would help lay one more brick to shorten the gap between interpreting studies and cognitive neuroscience.
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