ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the conceptual architecture underlying Cognitive Flexibility in connection with its relevance in the interpreting practice. Scholars posit that interpreting implies the ability to switch between languages while using one of them for comprehension and the other for production and the mental flexibility to switch from one language to another is crucial. The group of professionals showed not only a cognate facilitation effect, but also no switching cost compared to the group of untrained bilinguals, implying that the language co-activation boosted a flexible response that allowed to efficiently cope with new, unpredictable task demands. A legit deduction, based on the available studies and on how the interpreting task works, would be the following: the ability to keep domain-specific task elements in mind while processing other elements is heavily taxing at initial stages of training. Evidence of automaticity in the interlingual reformulation process is available in the literature.
