Interpreting Department, Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Department of Psychology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.
PLoS One. 2023 Nov 28;18(11):e0289484. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289484. eCollection 2023.
This study examines the phonological co-activation of a task-irrelevant language variety in mono- and bivarietal speakers of German with and without simultaneous interpreting (SI) experience during German comprehension and production. Assuming that language varieties in bivarietal speakers are co-activated analogously to the co-activation observed in bilinguals, the hypothesis was tested in the Visual World paradigm. Bivarietalism and SI experience were expected to affect co-activation, as bivarietalism requires communication-context based language-variety selection, while SI hinges on concurrent comprehension and production in two languages; task type was not expected to affect co-activation as previous evidence suggests the phenomenon occurs during comprehension and production. Sixty-four native speakers of German participated in an eye-tracking study and completed a comprehension and a production task. Half of the participants were trained interpreters and half of each sub-group were also speakers of Swiss German (i.e., bivarietal speakers). For comprehension, a growth-curve analysis of fixation proportions on phonological competitors revealed cross-variety co-activation, corroborating the hypothesis that co-activation in bivarietals' minds bears similar traits to language co-activation in multilingual minds. Conversely, co-activation differences were not attributable to SI experience, but rather to differences in language-variety use. Contrary to expectations, no evidence for phonological competition was found for either same- nor cross-variety competitors in either production task (interpreting- and word-naming variety). While phonological co-activation during production cannot be excluded based on our data, exploring the effects of additional demands involved in a production task hinging on a language-transfer component (oral translation from English to Standard German) merit further exploration in the light of a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of the SI task.
本研究考察了单语和双语使用者在进行德语理解和产生任务时，是否同时具有口译（SI）经验，以及是否涉及任务无关的语言变体的语音协同激活。假设双语者中观察到的协同激活同样适用于双语者，那么在视觉世界范式中检验了这一假设。双语和 SI 经验预计会影响协同激活，因为双语需要基于交际语境的语言变体选择，而 SI 则取决于两种语言的同时理解和产生；任务类型预计不会影响协同激活，因为之前的证据表明，这种现象发生在理解和产生过程中。64 名母语为德语的参与者参加了一项眼动追踪研究，并完成了一项理解和一项产生任务。参与者的一半是受过培训的口译员，每一半的参与者中又有一半是瑞士德语（即双语）使用者。在理解任务中，对固定比例的语音竞争者的增长曲线分析显示了跨变体协同激活，这验证了这样一个假设，即在双语者的头脑中，协同激活具有与多语言者头脑中的语言协同激活相似的特征。相反，协同激活的差异不是归因于 SI 经验，而是归因于语言变体使用的差异。与预期相反，在两种产生任务（口译和命名变体）中，对于同一种或跨变体的竞争者，都没有发现语音竞争的证据。虽然基于我们的数据不能排除产生过程中的语音协同激活，但探索在依赖语言转移成分（从英语到标准德语的口头翻译）的产生任务中涉及的额外需求的影响，鉴于对口译任务复杂性的更细致理解，值得进一步探索。
