A psycholinguistic perspective on Simultaneous Interpretation

Experimental psycholinguistics investigates the cognitive processes underlying our ability to comprehend and produce language using empirical tools similar to those used in experimental psychology. In so doing, it adopts the strategy of cognitive decomposition (see also Massaro & Shlesinger, this volume). It first studies the component language processes in isolation, and only later are these processes investigated in the larger context of other component processes. In the present paper, we attempt to illustrate how the complex cognitive skill of simultaneous translation can fruitfully be examined from this psycholinguistic perspective, despite the scepticism from some of the SI community towards such an experimental enterprise. Inversely, we will also show that studies of the processes underlying simultaneous translation promise to provide us with important insights in psycholinguistics.