Respeaking involves producing subtitles in real time to make live television programs accessible to deaf and hard of hearing viewers. In this study we investigated how the type of material to be respoken affects temporal aspects of respeaking, such as ear–voice span and pauses. Given the similarities between respeaking and interpreting (time constraints) and between interlingual respeaking and translation (interlingual processing), we also tested whether previous interpreting and translation experience leads to a smaller delay or lesser cognitive load in respeaking, as manifested by a smaller number of pauses. We tested 22 interpreters, 23 translators, and a control group of 12 bilingual controls, who performed interlingual (English to Polish) and intralingual (Polish to Polish) respeaking of five video clips with different characteristics (speech rate, number of speakers, and scriptedness). Interlingual respeaking was found to be more challenging than the intralingual one. The temporal aspects of respeaking were affected by clip type (especially in interpreters). We found no clear interpreter or translator advantage over the bilingual controls across the respeaking tasks. However, interlingual respeaking turned out to be too difficult for many bilinguals to perform at all. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine temporal aspects of respeaking as modulated by the type of materials and previous interpreting/translation experience. The results develop our understanding of temporal aspects of respeaking and are directly applicable to respeaker training.

This chapter selectively reviews the literature on bilingual language processing, with a special focus on the link to executive control, eye movements during reading, and differences between two different groups that are often lumped together: bilinguals (i.e., individuals who know two languages) and multilinguals (i.e., individuals who know more than two languages). To this end, we first discuss ideas about the cognitive demands associated with knowing more than a single language. We then review how eye movement reading research has clarified two important consequences of knowledge and use of more than one language: (1) cross-language activation and its relation to executive function and (2) weakened local (i.e., word-level) and global (i.e., text-level) aspects of reading performance. Finally, we review what is currently known about the bilingual vs. multilingual distinction, and present a re-analysis of previously published data (Whitford & Titone, 2016) exploring the effects of bilingual vs. multilingual status on natural reading in both younger and older adults. Although preliminary, these findings, along with the growing literature reviewed here from other domains, illustrate the importance of taking the bilingualism/multilingualism distinction into account when trying to understand the cognitive implications of knowing more than one language.

Cognates (words sharing form and meaning across languages, e.g. Polish–English FILM–FILM (identical cognates) or TUNNEL–TUNEL (non-identical cognates)) are processed faster than single-language words (cognate facilitation effect), which is modulated by a number of factors. Here, we extended the study reported by Lijewska and Chmiel (2015) and tested the influence of learning experience on non-identical cognate processing in a translation task in 2 experiments with Polish-German–English trilinguals and with German–English bilinguals. The trilinguals learned English and German via Polish, whereas the bilinguals learnt English via German. They translated Polish–English non-identical cognates (MUSZTARDA–SENF–MUSTARD), German–English non-identical cognates (TRAWA–GRAS–GRASS) and controls from English into Polish and into German (trilinguals) or only into German (bilinguals). We found no evidence for the influence of learning experience on cognate processing but the novel finding was a reliable facilitation effect obtained when only non-identical cognates were tested in a translation task with trilinguals (in the accuracy data) as well as with bilinguals (in translation latencies). Additionally, the reported study pointed to the important role of language proficiency in processing.

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The study examines how professional and trainee interpreters process syntax in sight translation. We asked 24 professionals and 15 trainees to sight translate sentences with subject-relative clauses and more difficult object-relative clauses while measuring translation accuracy, eye movements and translation durations. We found that trainees took longer to achieve similar translation accuracy as professionals and viewed the source text less than professionals to avoid interference, especially when reading more difficult object-relative sentences. Syntactic manipulation modulated translation and viewing times: participants took longer to translate object-relative sentences but viewed them less in order to avoid interference in target language reformulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show that reading measures in sight translation should be analysed together with translation times to explain complex reading patterns. It also proposes a new measure, percentage of dwell time, as an index of interference avoidance.