Differences between Expert and Novice Performance

The scientific investigation and measurement of expert performance in any field requires systematic collection and identification of excellent performances that are reliable and reproducible (Ericsson, 1996). Originated from the field of chess, this strain of studies examines expert performance vis-a-vis amateur performance and tracks the acquisition trajectory of experts to identify skills and knowledge that distinguish excellent performance in the hope of developing a general theory on

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expert performance acquisition. While it is easy to spot the value of these studies in informing training curriculums, it is nevertheless very challenging to achieve. The scarcity of individuals performing at the highest level of their games makes it difficult to find sufficient number of subjects for a piece scientific research, let alone the complexity of enrolling these subjects out of their busy schedules (Ericsson, 1996).

This may partly explain why almost all of the empirical studies on the impact of foreign accent on interpreting performance featured student participants, with Chang and Wu (2012) being the only exception. This is also one of the gaps that the study attempts to fill in the existing knowledge on the issue.

Past research on this topic seem to suggest that in most domains, experts possess different cognitive and perceptual motor skills and domain-specific adaptation skills that allow them to deliver excellent achievement (Ericsson, 1996). More specifically, experts construct and process information differently (Moser-Mercer, 1997). Experts can resort to higher level of abstraction that allows them "to circumvent some basic information-processing limits" (Ericsson, 1996, p. 43) and are able to retrieve

information more efficiently. Moreover, experts can detect predictive cues to facilitate anticipation and thus require minimal reaction times to a task (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). Finally, contrary to common belief that experts rely on automation of

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processes to deliver excellent performance, "most types of expert performance are mediated by reportable thoughts involving planning, reasoning, and anticipation"

(Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996, p. 291). In the field of translation and interpreting, many research studies have been conducted to investigate the actual workings of the above expert-novice differences to understand the specific skills that can be nurtured in the process of expertise development.

2.4.2 Differences between Professional and Trainee Interpreters' Performance

In a summary of the conclusions emerging from research on expert-novice differences in translation and interpreting, Moser-Mercer (1997) classified the differences that have emerged in previous research into two levels: the level of

knowledge base, and the level of strategies (Moser-Mercer, 1997, p. 257). At the level of knowledge base, expert translators and interpreters' organization of factual

knowledge contains more associative knowledge and domain connections. Experts also links their semantic knowledge to context more closely. Finally, experts are able to use established schematic knowledge to translate and interpret specific types of discourse or text.

As for the differences in strategies, expert interpreters tend to attend to

information or segments of input that they could make out first, and make good use of

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contextual clues to solve the unknown information. This is a kind of comprehension strategies that can aid the processing of unknown information instead of being stuck by it, which is common amongst novice interpreters. In Kalina (1994), it has also been suggested that professional interpreters use monitoring strategies more effectively to limit their corrections only to major errors. Finally, in Liu, Schallert & Carroll (2004), professional interpreters that are no different from students in their working memory were observed to outperform student interpreters in simultaneous interpreting, suggesting that expert interpreters excel in capacity management skills that enable them to better leverage the limited cognitive resources available. The results of these three pieces of research point out the possibility that, in the context of processing foreign-accented speech that causes intelligibility difficulties, experts are strategically more capable of compensating the lost information with the known information, and that they can monitor and manage their cognitive resources efficiently to cope with the challenges imposed by unfamiliar accents.

2.5 Cognitive Management in Simultaneous Interpreting: The Effort Model

To better understand the concept of 'cognitive resource management' in the context of interpreting, one must refer to the Effort Model for simultaneous

interpretation proposed by Daniel Gile. This model assumes that the mental energy

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require for interpreting is limited in supply, and that when the requirement exceeds that of supply, interpreting performance deteriorates (Gile, 2009). In Gile (1997), the author laid out that when interpreting simultaneously, interpreters activate three basic efforts to process different segments of the input, namely, listening and analysis effort, production effort, and memory effort, and apply a coordination effort to coordinate the workings of the three basic efforts. Only if the capacity available for each effort exceeds its requirement for the task in hand can the interpreting proceed smoothly.

The total capacity available to the interpreter must also be larger than the total requirement of the interpreting task to ensure a normal interpreting performance.

Concerning expertise development, Gile himself treated the development of interpreting expertise as the process of increasing efficiency in the capacity management system in the Effort Model (Gile, 2009). This corresponds with the findings of Liu et al. (2004) that expert interpreters are masters at cognitive resource management. In other words, it is the improvement of coordination effort that truly distinguishes professional interpreters from trainees (Liu, 2008). However, on the other hand, experts' ability to retrieve information more efficiently due to the different knowledge structures, as commented by Ericsson (1996) may also imply that

professional interpreters can react faster in the listening and analysis stage and

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production stage, and thus can process speech input that are higher in processing requirement, such as foreign-accented speech, without apparent collapses. In conclusion, expertise development in the field of interpreting may involve both the decreasing effort of each component processes and the increasing efficiency of

coordination effort. In the current project, the retrospective interview can enlighten us on whether a professional-trainee difference in the effort in each component process or/and the efficiency in coordination effort can be observed.