Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
2nd Meeting of Bertinoro Translation Society, Murcia, İspanya, 18 - 20 Haziran 2023
Visual mental imagery plays a key role in
verbal memory (Paivio, 1969). For instance, individuals with better imagery
have also better memory for narratives (Bagri and Jones, 2018). Due to the
well-established role of memory in interpreting, mental imagery has long been
regarded as a promising predictor of interpreting performance and yet, it is
critically understudied with some exceptions (e.g., Chmiel, 2019; see also
Martín de León, 2017). In this vein, our previous results (Kumcu and Öztürk,
2022) showed that interpreting trainees who are better at
controlling/manipulating visual mental images (but importantly, not with more vivid
imagery) performed better in consecutively interpreting (particularly less
imageable) speeches without notes. The current study, designed as an extended
follow-up to Kumcu and Öztürk (2022), aims to investigate the effect of
individual differences in visual mental imagery on simultaneous interpreting
(SI) performance in speeches varying in emotionality. To this aim, 25
interpreting trainees will be administered two imagery scales (the revised
version of The Vividness of Visual Imagery Scale - VVIQ-2 (Marks, 1995) and The
Gordon Test of Visual Imagery Control - TVIC (Gordon, 1949)) measuring
vividness and control/manipulation skills, respectively. Participants will also
be tested through a colour naming task (Cui et al., 2007) and a mental rotation
task as objective counterparts of the self-reported components of imagery. They
will then be asked to simultaneously interpret neutral and emotional speeches (see
Korpal and Jasielska, 2019) controlled for valence, imageability, difficulty,
familiarity, and delivery speed. SI performance will be analysed based on a
rubric breaking down output quality into fidelity (60 %), accuracy (20 %), and
delivery (20 %) (see Rojo López et al., 2021). Participants’ auditory output
will be analysed on PRAAT (Boersma and Weenink, 2022) for the prosody markers
of stress (see Sondhi et al., 2015): pitch as a function of the fundamental
frequency and disfluency as a function of silent and filled pauses as opposed
to baseline speech production. The study aims to answer two main research
questions: (1) What is the effect of vividness and control of visual mental
imagery on SI performance? Although there is evidence that image-schematic
prompts improve propositional recall and the shadowing accuracy among
interpreting trainees (Zuo, 2014), how individual differences in imagery
vividness and control map onto SI performance is currently unknown. Since
several studies have shown that SI has different cognitive demands compared to
CI (e.g., Lin et al., 2021), vividness, rather than the control might predict
SI performance in contrast to CI. (2) What is the effect of vividness and
control of visual imagery on stress during SI? Imagery is conceptualised as an
"emotional amplifier" of mental content (Wicken et al., 2021). Thus,
participants who conjure up more vivid mental images might experience greater
stress (computed through the above-mentioned prosody parameters) when
interpreting emotional speeches. On the other hand, the ability to control
mental images might minimise acoustic reflections of stress during
interpreting.