Ear–voice span in simultaneous interpreting

Abstract

Ear–voice span (EVS) has been recognised as reflecting the cognitive processes involved in simultaneous interpreting. This article reports on a study examining the influence on fluctuations in EVS of text-specific factors, interpreter-specific factors and individual variation. We used naturalistic data from the Polish Interpreting Corpus (PINC), a 20,000-token bidirectional Polish–English corpus of interpretations from the European Parliament. We fitted two linear mixed-effects models and analysed the models’ random variance structure. Our findings show that EVS is modulated by interpreting direction, speech delivery type, source and target text speech rate, interpreter experience, selected word types, the position of a sentence in a text and the position of a word in a sentence. Contrary to expectations, we found no effect of interpreter working memory on EVS. Likewise, EVS was not found to be shortened for numbers and proper names and was inconsistently modulated by gender. Finally, we also saw that individual variation was a source of EVS modulation.