Strategic additions in simultaneous interpreting from a signed language into a spoken language

Working memory is a complex cognitive component responsible for maintenance of information during processing. Interpreting research has so far focused on working memory capacity rather than on the central executive functions. In the study described here, 28 professional interpreters completed a battery of four central executive tasks and three simultaneous interpretations (from English into Czech or Dutch ‘A’). The results show that: (a) certain measurable features of simultaneous interpreting are related to the central executive functions of working memory; (b) one working memory function (inhibition of distractors) seems to be related to interpreting experience, while the others (automatic response inhibition, updating, attention switching) do not; (c) the relationship between working memory and simultaneous interpreting is such that different working memory functions predict different sub-processes in simultaneous interpreting, in complex patterns. The conclusions of this study are data-driven, but in line with the current literature. More specifically, the findings support those accounts of simultaneous interpreting which emphasize attentional control as an important component of the simultaneous interpreting process.

This study investigated the effects of hearing status and age of signed language acquisition on signed language working memory capacity. Professional Auslan (Australian sign language)/English interpreters (hearing native signers and hearing nonnative signers) and deaf Auslan signers (deaf native signers and deaf nonnative signers) completed an Auslan working memory (WM) span task. The results revealed that the hearing signers (i.e., the professional interpreters) significantly outperformed the deaf signers on the Auslan WM span task. However, the results showed no significant differences between the native signers and the nonnative signers in their Auslan working memory capacity. Furthermore, there was no significant interaction between hearing status and age of signed language acquisition. Additionally, the study found no significant differences between the deaf native signers (adults) and the deaf nonnative signers (adults) in their Auslan working memory capacity. The findings are discussed in relation to the participants' memory strategies and their early language experience. The findings present challenges for WM theories.

IntroductionEarly linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors – early access to sign and/or spoken language – on reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers.MethodsIn the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hard-of-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested.ResultsHard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found.DiscussionOur results suggest a unique advantage for the hard-of-hearing individuals from having early access to both sign and spoken language and support the existing claims that early exposure to sign language is beneficial not only for deaf but also for hard-of-hearing children.

This study sets out to describe simultaneous interpreters' attention-sharing initiatives when exposed under input from both videotaped speech recording and real-time transcriptions. Separation of mental energy in acquiring visual input accords with the human brain's statistic optimization principle where the same property of an object is presented through diverse fashions. In examining professional interpreters' initiatives, the authors invited five professional English-Chinese conference interpreters to simultaneously interpret a videotaped speech with real-time captions generated by speech recognition engine while meanwhile monitoring their eye movements. The results indicate the professional interpreters' preferences in referring to visually presented captions along with the speaker's facial expressions, where low-frequency words, proper names, and numbers gained greater attention than words with higher frequency. This phenomenon might be explained by the working memory theory in which the central executive enables redundancy gains retrieved from dual-channel information.

Generating data from a comparable corpus comprising original English speeches and English simultaneous interpretations of Chinese speeches from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), this study aims to explore the use of formulaic expressions, specifically four-word lexical bundles, in both original speech and interpreted speech. By analyzing the overall frequency and typical discourse functions of these bundles in the two English varieties, the results showed that interpreters used lexical bundles more frequently than native English speakers, suggesting a higher level of formulaicity in interpreted speeches. This higher formulaicity may be explained by normalization and risk-management strategy. In addition, this study found that interpreters used a greater variety of four-word bundle types across the three broad functional categories than native speakers. This result indicates that interpreters and speakers may utilize distinct devices in producing their speech on comparable topics. That is, interpreters preferred to use lexical bundles to achieve fluency, while native speakers showed greater linguistic variability and relied less on these pre-constructed chunks of language. These findings highlight the importance of formulaicity in simultaneous interpreting and how such pre-constructed lexical bundles function to help interpreters achieve adequate rendition.

Communication obstacles in health care settings adversely impact patient-practitioner interactions by impeding service efficiency, reducing mutual trust and satisfaction, or even endangering health outcomes. When interlocutors are separated by language, interpreters are required. The efficacy of interpreting, however, is constrained not just by interpreters' competence but also by health care providers' facility working with interpreters. Deaf individuals whose preferred form of communication is a signed language often encounter communicative barriers in health care settings. In those environments, signing Deaf people are entitled to equal communicative access via sign language interpreting services according to the Americans with Disabilities Act and Executive Order 13166, the Limited English Proficiency Initiative. Yet, litigation in states across the United States suggests that individual and institutional providers remain uncertain about their legal obligations to provide equal communicative access. This article discusses the legal and ethical imperatives for using professionally certified (vs. ad hoc) sign language interpreters in health care settings. First outlining the legal terrain governing provision of sign language interpreting services, the article then describes different types of "sign language" (e.g., American Sign Language vs. manually coded English) and different forms of "sign language interpreting" (e.g., interpretation vs. transliteration vs. translation; simultaneous vs. consecutive interpreting; individual vs. team interpreting). This is followed by reviews of the formal credentialing process and of specialized forms of sign language interpreting-that is, certified deaf interpreting, trilingual interpreting, and court interpreting. After discussing practical steps for contracting professional sign language interpreters and addressing ethical issues of confidentiality, this article concludes by offering suggestions for working more effectively with Deaf clients via professional sign language interpreters.

Reviewed by: Sign languages Donna Jo Napoli Sign languages. Ed. by Diane Brentari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xxi, 691. ISBN 9780521883702. $160 (Hb). Twenty-five chapters (including an instructive introduction) by fifty-two scholars offer information about over forty sign languages. Assessing how many sign languages there are in the world is difficult both because countries rarely include information about sign in censuses and because the determination of what counts as a language versus a less-developed gestural system is tricky. Still, the number of sign languages studied here is impressive, particularly since most here are genetically unrelated. This book is a treasure trove. Many early studies of sign languages aimed to establish their status as bona fide natural languages and, thus, focused on properties in common with spoken languages. Once that basic issue was confirmed, attention turned to how modality differences affect grammar and the behavior of language communities, thus allowing us to advance our knowledge both of cognitive aspects of language and psychosocial factors pertinent to language use. The introduction to this volume beautifully lays out three advantages of considering sign languages in this regard. First, analysis [End Page 890] of a sign language can make clear what visual properties of the phonetic system motivate structural linguistic properties, opening the door for linguists to seek out what auditory properties of the phonetic system do the same in spoken languages. Second, iconicity in sign languages is readily accessible and apparent in a much wider range of data than generally found in spoken language, so its role can be examined closely. I would add that studying the ways in which sign iconicity yields to grammatical properties over time and the ways in which it yields to randomness over time (due to the inherent limitations of iconicity with respect to conveying isolated lexical items) can help us better understand the ways in which spoken language iconicity changes over time, as well as offer a perspective on the development and evolution of writing systems. Third, since new sign languages are emerging around the globe, study of sign languages offers data about the emergence of language that are otherwise unavailable. Already, study of sign languages (e.g. Nicaraguan Sign Language) has taught us that language evolution can proceed far more rapidly than had previously been hypothesized. To all these, one could add the advantage that studying sign languages offers us information on typology of language. Since sign languages use different articulators with different capabilities from those of spoken language and since their organization involves visual parameters as opposed to auditory parameters, possibilities for variation among sign languages come up that do not arise in spoken language. By looking at the ways that sign languages group together, we can enrich our inventory of the factors around which languages typologize in general and thus enhance our knowledge of language in general. In sum, if you are not already convinced that we no longer have to let the lingu(a) of linguistics limit our vision of our field, this volume will help remove remaining blinders, with articles written by renowned scholars (the contributors list is almost a who’s who of sign linguistics) and touching on so many issues that linguists of any ilk can find something to dig into here. Part 1 is on the history of sign languages and their generational transmission. From around World War I until the 1950s, Switzerland practiced sterilization of deaf people, forbade marriage among the deaf, and put deaf women in institutions, all in an effort to eradicate deafness. Today, eighty percent of deaf children get cochlear implants (CI), and typically do not sign. While deaf groups advocate use of sign, oral-only deaf people contradict them. Schools for the deaf have produced few graduates who qualify to enter universities. No universities have faculty positions specializing in sign language so little research has been done on Swiss sign languages. While sign languages are not officially oppressed, they are not officially recognized, and deafness is still considered a malady in need of cure. All this information is just part of the first article, by Penny Boyes Braem and Christian Rathmann, which goes on...

Many movements that humans see naturally suggest something other than themselves. This is a legacy from the remotest time. Among animals, movements of prey and predator give each an indication of what may happen next and a basis for choosing their own actions. As species evolved, the movements that could be made and the meanings that could be suggested in those movements became increasingly sophisticated. Among the higher primates, grooming, aggressive and submissive displays, begging, and other movements regulate complex social interactions. Humans also interpret movements; they inform us of what others do, what happens to things, and how a movement maker feels—all this is instinctive. It has been understood for a long time that movements, gestures, among them, have semantic interpretations. The argument of these chapters, however, is that syntactic interpretation has also evolved and is also eminently natural. Humans not only make, see, and interpret movement but also discern patterns in it: "Something dropped," "That one leapt," "She took it." Movements, when they become the primary symbols of a sign language, have a syntactic structure that can represent these patterns and many others that grow out of them. Sounds can alarm, warn, beckon, threaten, and so on; but unaided by convention they cannot represent nounlike or verblike concepts. Powerless to make even this fundamental grammatical distinction, [End Page 152] sounds have no natural, direct way to show concepts linked in the relationship called predication or syntax. Only convention can link sounds to word meanings and sentence meanings. Click for larger view Figure 1 The direction of movement of a sign can be crucial to understanding the meaning of the sign. Primary sign languages are more natural than spoken languages because a visible sign often carries a visual clue to what it signifies. For example, the meaning of "I give" reverses the meaning of "I was given." Gestured, the two meanings are clearly opposite: the former sign moves outward from the signer; "I was given" moves toward the signer (see fig. 1). But when meanings like these are spoken in English, one must know the language to understand the crucial difference between them. To a speaker or reader of English, the auxiliary was signals the difference. Using was reverses the direction of the giving, but neither the vocal sounds that compose was nor the word itself refer to the direction of transitivity. In a sign language, however, what is given goes from the giver to the receiver; no rule is needed until language becomes spoken. Humans possess an innate, clear understanding, gained early in life, that movement (of anything) toward self differs from movement away from self. Infants acquire this understanding when activity around them and their own hands and eyes and brain circuitry bring [End Page 153] it into their ken. Later, of course, well beyond the period of infancy, they learn that a speaker's use of active or passive voice signals this basic reversal of direction, which was clear to them previously. Speakers of languages have had to come up with various devices to indicate the difference between giving and being given and the whole active/passive distinction. Signers simply make opposed movements to signal the reversal of direction. This relationship of language sign to meaning is not derived from abstract rules. We first understood the active/passive meaning difference by seeing, moving, feeling—by physical experience cognized. Observing the direction of physical actions is so simple and obvious that one may wonder why spoken languages need complex active—passive rules; but the explanation is obvious: sounds that voices make can no more directly indicate the difference between give and receive than that between to and from. As the previous chapter revealed, alternate sign languages used by hearing people may differ from primary sign languages used by those who are deaf, but whether the difference is deep-seated or only one of degree has yet to he determined. If an alternate sign language fully represents a spoken language, it is just as correct to...

Brady is a 5-year-old boy who was seen in a multidisciplinary clinic for evaluation of deaf and hard of hearing children. Brady was born full-term after an uncomplicated pregnancy. He was referred for audiological evaluation after his newborn hearing screen and was diagnosed with a severe-to-profound bilateral sensorineural hearing difference at age 6 months. He has no other medical history.Brady was referred for developmental evaluation after completing his medical workup and cochlear implantation at an outside institution. No etiologic cause of his hearing difference was identified, and his diagnosis was presumed to be genetic and nonsyndromic. He had previously undergone right cochlear implantation at age 14 months and left cochlear implantation at age 23 months. Brady received speech and language therapy, with an emphasis on spoken language through early intervention, and met all motor and social milestones at appropriate times. Despite therapy, he continued to show delays in meeting language and communication milestones. Given concerns over persistent language delays after cochlear implantation, he underwent an interdisciplinary speech, language, and psychological evaluation at 3 years 4 months old. At the time of his evaluation, he was noted to have robust social skills but significantly delayed expressive and receptive language skills with language use limited to single words.After the initial evaluation, he was enrolled at a school for the deaf with instruction provided in both spoken English and American Sign Language. In follow-up evaluation at age 4 years 8 months, Brady was described as happy, cooperative, and eager to connect socially. It was noted that he had age-appropriate visual spatial cognitive and motor skills and had made some gains compared with prior assessments in both spoken and sign language. Notably, however, his language abilities and most areas of adaptive living skills remained below what would be expected by his developmental age and in some domains plateaued compared with prior assessments. He was able to produce some words and signs and responded to all prompts using only single words or signs and gestures. Brady's parents present today to your multidisciplinary clinic asking to understand why his language has not progressed further and to learn how they can help him reach his full potential.

Reviewed by: Event representation in language and cognition Engin Arik Jürgen Bohnemeyer and Eric Pederson, eds. 2011. Event representation in language and cognition. In the series Language, culture and cognition 11. CambridgeCambridge University Press. Pp. xiii + 282. US $95.00 (hardcover). Since, perhaps, the publication of Pederson et al. (1998) and Levinson (2003), there has been growing interest in studying the language of spatial representations. The [End Page 461] present book, the eleventh in the series Language, culture and cognition, is another invaluable addition to this field. Focusing on event representations in language and cognition, this book consists of eleven chapters written by leading experts in the field. In the first chapter, “On representing events — an introduction” (pp. 1–12), Pederson and Bohnemeyer discuss the concept of event and review previous analyses of event representation in the linguistics and psychology literature. The authors underline that the book aims to bring together the linguistic and psychological research on linguistic and cognitive event representations. Then, they provide a brief summary of the articles in the book. In the following article, “Event representation in serial verb constructions” (pp. 13–42), Pawley starts by reminding readers about the discussion between him and Givón in their earlier publications on the nature of event representations in serial verb constructions of some languages of New Guinea. The author here focuses on Kalam and English to further elaborate this discussion. In doing so, he gives a basic outline of word classes, verbal clauses, and clause-chaining constructions in Kalam, presents the findings of Givon’s studies, shows logical problems in those studies, and finally proposes a new study to compare compact and narrative serial verb constructions. According to the author, these conventionally used narrative serial verb constructions cannot be translated as a single verb but are comparable to narrations or short stories in English. It is this difference that may make speakers of Kalam and English differ from one another in their segmentation of events. In the third article, “The macro-event property: The segmentation of causal chains” (pp. 43–67), Bohnemeyer et al. examine how languages encode causal chains of events. The authors present results from their studies which were collected from four languages (Ewe, Japanese, Lao, and Yukatek) using a questionnaire and 74 video clips to elicit event descriptions. In doing so, they propose that languages differ from one another in the way that they segment events with respect to the macro-event property (MEP), defined as follows: “an event-denoting construction has the MEP iff it combines only with those time-propositional or durational operators that have scope over all sub-events it entails” (p. 48). The studies reported here show that Japanese is different from the other three languages in that Japanese, but not the others, uses multiple MEP expressions to encode causal chains of events. In “Event representation, time event relations, and clause structure: A cross-linguistic study of English and German” (pp. 68–83), Carroll and von Stutterheim investigate to what extent English and German speakers differ from each other in macro-event properties and sub-events in their event descriptions. For this, the authors collect data from 30 English and 30 German speakers by using 40 video clips, each depicting a different event. They show that English descriptions include new referents in an existential predication then categorize the event in a subordinate clause whereas German descriptions include new referents and the event in the same clause (e.g., There is a girl shopping in a supermarket vs. A girl shops in a supermarket). Unlike the other articles, which focus on event representations in spoken languages, Özyürek and Perniss’s chapter (pp. 84–107) examines event representations in sign languages, focusing on Turkish Sign Language and German Sign Language. [End Page 462] Investigating how sign languages represent events can provide new insights because sign languages use the space in front of the signers and the body to represent spatial relations. The authors focus on perspective taking in narratives and using a set of predicates in events that depict transitivity to show to what extent these two sign languages are similar to and different from each other. In “Linguistic and...

Sign languages are visual-gestural communication systems with a great potential for iconic structures and indeed, in sign languages iconicity is pervasive, both on the lexical and the grammical levels. However, in early sign language research the role of iconicity was downplayed in order to stress the similarities in structure between sign languages and spoken languages. For some authors, on the other hand, iconicity has been a reason for claiming that sign languages are organised in a fundamentally different way from spoken languages. Looking at sign languages from a phonological perspective, important questions remain unanswered in both these approaches. In this paper we try to provide answers to two questions. First, does iconicity play a part in the linguistic structure of sign languages and are sign language users aware of it? Second, what is the status of the sublexical elements in sign languages, and more specifically, should they be considered as phonemes or as morphemes? In the first section of the paper we shall explore the various forms of iconicity in sign languages, using the framework of Taub’s Analogue Building Model (2001). In the second and third sections we shall confront two approaches of sign language phonology, Cuxac’s sign language differential view with a focus on iconicity as the fundamental organising principle (1996, 2000) and the more spoken language compatible concepts of phonetic and semantic implementation by Van der Kooij (2002). These two accounts are the point of departure for the fourth section in which we shall put forward a proposal of an iconic superstructure which addresses iconicity in both the spoken and signed modalities and which offers an answer to both above-mentioned questions.

Sign Language Linguistics is a relatively young area of linguistic research. Its origin dates back to the first analysis of American Sign Language by Stokoe (Stokoe, 1960). However, sign language linguistics in general has a quite long history in comparison to Georgian Sign Language (GESL) linguistics, which only counts several years. Despite its brief history, GESL research includes almost all the linguistic levels and the features of GESL that have already been explored promise high expectations for future discoveries. Research of any unexplored sign language is an indispensable resource for linguists and may produce unexpected results, especially when this sign language deploys such interesting features as GESL. Thus, the results of GESL research is invaluable for not only sign language linguistics, but also for typological studies of sign and spoken languages.

In recent decades, the advent of affordable digital video-recording technology and freely downloadable specialised software for storing, viewing, editing, and annotating video and audio has contributed to a reassessment of the importance of the relation between the body, language, and communication in a variety of scientific domains, such as psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cognitive sciences and several others (Müller et al 2013, 2014). One of the consequences has also been the emergence of a new interdiscipline – Gesture Studies – entirely devoted to the investigation of the gestural modality in human interaction. However, while gesture and its relation to speech have been examined in face-to-face conversations, oral narratives, public speaking, task-based discourse, as well as other types of communicative situations, only a handful of studies to date have documented, analysed and described the range and functions of the gestures produced by conference interpreters in the booth. One of the possible reasons for this lack of attention to the body in interpreting has to do with the emphasis on decontextualised cognitive processes in the simultaneous interpreting (SI) mode, which dominated the academic field of conference interpreting research since its beginning in the 1950s until the mid-1990s (Diriker 2004: 7; Gile 1998: 70; Pöchhacker 1995: 33). In addition, the historical shift from consecutive to simultaneous interpreting in conference settings and the now more generalised use of remote interpreting resulted in a removal of the interpreter’s body from the public eye. All this, coupled with the still prevalent notion that simultaneous interpreting (SI) is an essentially verbal and monologic endeavour, as well as the difficulty in finding interpreters willing to be filmed and/or securing permission for filming, led to a dearth of multimodal data in Conference Interpreting Research. The present volume constitutes a first clear attempt at redressing this imbalance by ‘linking up with video’, while this specific chapter hopes to start filling this gap by contributing to a better understanding of the role played by gesture in SI discourse and by introducing the reader to a qualitative microanalytical approach to gestural behaviour that may be applied to the study of other modes of interpreting. After defining gesture and its structural properties within the framework of an integrated multimodal view of language and communication and introducing some working concepts from the field of Gesture Studies, the chapter presents a video-based quasi-experimental study with four professional conference interpreters working simultaneously from English into European Portuguese (henceforth ‘Portuguese’). The study constitutes the first part of a larger research project which explores gesture production in SI by triangulating the data, methods and results from the open quasi-experiment described here, an observational field study with the same subjects, and in-depth semi-structured interviews with a larger number of interpreters. Due to space limitations, however, this chapter will only cover the first investigation. The findings offer an insight into the rich range of gestures deployed in the booth and shed some light on the multimodal nature of meaning-making in simultaneous interpreting.

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BACKGROUND: Deaf people using sign and/or spoken language and hearing-impaired people using spoken language face frequent difficulties in activities of daily living due to the communication barriers. Among the main strategies to compensate or mitigate these difficulties we find assistive devices: video relay services, cochlear implant, audio induction loop, FM system, hearing aids. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to explore factors contributing to assistive technology abandonment among deaf individuals who use sign language within the deaf community and those who use spoken language. METHODS: A non-experimental, cross-sectional, correlational design was used for the study. A semi-structured interview guide in the form of an ad hoc questionnaire containing 10 questions based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. The study was carried out in Salamanca (Spain) in the association SADAP (Association of Postlocution Hearing Loss People) and CCSS (Salamanca Cultural Center for the Deaf). RESULTS: A total of 36 people participated in the study: 6 deaf people, 9 hearing loss people, 8 relatives and 13 professionals. CONCLUSIONS: The most common factors leading to assistive technology abandonment among deaf and hearing-impaired individuals include negative perceptions of the product, malfunction issues, high maintenance costs, insufficient training, and the stigma associated with its use. SIGNIFICANCE: There is a scarcity of studies within occupational therapy focusing on individuals with hearing loss, particularly those who communicate through sign language. This population often faces activity limitations and participation restrictions. While assistive products and technologies can enhance their daily functioning, negative factors that result in abandonment or discontinuation of use remain significant concerns.