The impact of visible lip movements on silent pauses in simultaneous interpreting

Abstract

Simultaneous interpreting requires interpreters to listen to a source text while producing the target text in a second language. In addition, the interpreter needs to process various types of visual input, which may further increase the already high cognitive load. A study with 14 students of interpreting was conducted to investigate the impact of a speaker’s visible lip movements on cognitive load in simultaneous interpreting by analysing the duration of silent pauses in the target texts. Background noise masking the source speech was introduced as a control condition for cognitive load. Silent pause durations were shorter when interpreters saw the speaker’s lip movements, which indicates that interpreters benefitted from visual input. Furthermore, silent pause durations were longer with noise, which suggests that comparative silent pause durations can indicate changes in cognitive load.

Disfluencies and directionality in simultaneous interpreting: A corpus study comparing into-B and into-A interpretations from the European Parliament

“…Silent pauses, also referred to in literature as unfilled pauses (e.g., Han & An, 2021), are the breaches in fluency where no voice activity is recorded (in contrast to filled pauses) and the flow of speech is interrupted (Gieshoff, 2021). As observed by Igras-Cybulska et al (2016), pausing behaviour in speech is highly idiosyncratic.…”

“…Cecot's examples for Italian include: eeh, mhm, mah, beh, and bah, while Hale lists eh, ah, em and am for Spanish. In this study we shall use the term hesitation markers, as the term filled pauses appears to be broader and includes also inter-word vowel lengthening, repetitions and corrections (Gieshoff, 2021). Hesitation markers are believed to be induced by cognitive load and/or speech planning effort (Hale, 2004;Plevoets & Defrancq, 2016).…”