Interpreter Advantage in Coordination at Early Stages of Interpreting Training

We hypothesize that there may be an interpreter advantage associated with the bottleneck switching component of the coordination skill. If an advantage in coordination was to be found in the present study, the advantageous group of interpreting students would outperform in dual-task costs (the difference between dual-task and single-task conditions, with smaller costs suggesting better coordination), and the better performance would be restricted to Task 2 (suggesting bottleneck switching component of coordination). If no advantage was to be found for interpreting students, no group differences or even larger dual-task costs for these students may be obtained. Data obtained from the dual-task experiments included accuracy (ACC) and response time (RT) for Task 1 and Task 2. The four types of data were analyzed separately following the same procedure. Specifically, the dual-task costs were subjected to an ANCOVA analysis with a between-group variable of Group (Interpreting, Control for Experiment 1; More-IE, Less-IE for Experiment 2, with IE referring to interpreting training experience), and a within-group variable of Condition (dual-task_100, dual-task_150, dual-task_450, with 100, 150, 450 referring to the three SOA conditions). The covariate for Experiment 1 (the intermediate stage of interpreting training) was Mother’s education level, and that for Experiment 2 (the beginning stage) was Frequency of L2 use. The results showed that, in Experiment 1, the Interpreter group exhibited smaller dual-task costs only in Task 2 than the Control group, suggesting an interpreter advantage in coordination, especially in the bottleneck switching component at the intermediate stage of interpreting training. In Experiment 2, the More-IE group exhibited larger dual-task costs in Task 1 than the Less-IE group, suggesting a temporary setback of the coordination skill at the beginning stage of interpreting training.