Short-Term Memory and Simultaneous Interpretation: an Experimental Study on verbatim Recall

Abstract

This study focuses on the importance of the syntactic structure of an oral text in the cognitive processes underlying simultaneous interpretation. The experimental paradigm chosen for this study was devised by the American researcher Robert Jarvella at the beginning of the 70's. The experiments carried out by Jarvella centre on 'immediate recall' tasks, aiming at assessing the influence of formai structures on speech processing. The first finding of Jarvella's studies was listeners' tendency to segment the incoming information into chunks, corresponding to the syntactic segmentation into 'clauses' and 'sentences'.