ABSTRACT
This study investigates the effect of transitional probability (TP), i.e. the statistical likelihood with which words appear in a given language, on predictive processes in a simultaneous interpreting (SI) task created in the lab performed by English-German bilinguals. In a previous study, Hodzik and Williams (2017) looked at contextual and TP effects on predictive processes during SI performed by both English-German bilinguals and interpreters with English and German as their A and B languages respectively. For the purpose of this study, the experimental materials previously used in Hodzik and Williams (2017) were adapted to an investigation of TP as a cue to prediction with the purpose of revealing the sentence and lexical processing mechanisms underlying SI as a bilingual language processing task. To this end, TP effects were investigated across three tasks: i) a shadowing task in German; ii) SI of German verb-final sentences into English (verb-medial) sentences and iii) SI of German verb-medial into English (verb-medial) sentences. The present findings revealed a close relationship between the use of TP as a cue to prediction and the source and target language sentence structures. Although these findings cannot be used to draw any reliable conclusions regarding actual SI, the interdisciplinary nature of the study, which allows for an investigation of an SI task created in the lab on-line, i.e. as it happens, can still inform SI research by revealing something about the processing mechanisms underlying a very complex cognitive task.
