Hsin-Chin Chen

Effect of Language Proficiency and Degree of Formal Training in Simultaneous Interpreting on Working Memory and Interpreting Performance: Evidence from Mandarin-English Speakers

The influence of second language proficiency and length of formal training in interpretation on simultaneous interpreting (SI) performance and working memory was examined in Mandarin–English student interpreters with one year (n = 11) or two years of formal training in interpretation (n = 9) and in 16 Mandarin–English untrained bilingual controls. SI performance was significantly better in Year 2 than in Year 1 student interpreters, and in Year 1 interpreters relative to bilingual controls. SI performance was also better in advanced L2 users and in high-memory span individuals, whether trained or not in SI. Both Year 1 and Year 2 students outperformed bilingual controls in L1 and L2 reading span. Although Year 2 students tended to show higher working memory span than Year 1 students, the difference was not significant. Finally, working memory span was higher in individuals with greater L2 proficiency. It is concluded that differences in language proficiency may underlie observed differences in both interpreting performance and working memory and that language processing skills (rather than working memory) may be enhanced by formal training in interpreting.

Homophonic and semantic priming of Japanese kanji words: A time course study

In an examination of the time course of activation of phonological and semantic information in processing kanji script, two lexical decision experiments were conducted with native readers of Japanese. Kanji targets were preceded at short (85-msec) and long (150-msec) intervals by homophonic, semantically related, or unrelated primes presented in kanji (Experiment 1) or by hiragana transcriptions of the kanji primes (Experiment 2). When primes were in kanji, semantic relatedness facilitated kanji target recognition at both intervals but homophonic relatedness did not. When primes were in hiragana, kanji target recognition was facilitated by homophonic relatedness at both intervals and by semantic relatedness only at the longer interval. The absence of homophonic priming of kanji targets by kanji primes challenges the universal phonology principle’s claim that phonology is central to accessing meaning from print. The stimuli used in the present study may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Homophone density and phonological frequency in Chinese word recognition

The present research factorially examined the effects of homophone density, visual frequency, and phonological frequency (defined here as the cumulative frequency of homophone mates) in Chinese visual word recognition. Stimuli were compound characters matched in semantic and phonetic radical neighbourhood density and in average visual frequency of orthographic neighbours. In contrast to a previous study with Chinese by Ziegler, Tan, Perry, and Montant (2000), no facilitative effect of phonological frequency was observed. Unlike previous findings with English readers of inhibitory effects of homophones, a facilitative effect of homophone density – restricted to low visual frequency words – was obtained for Chinese in both lexical decision (Exp. 1) and naming (Exp. 2), similar to Ziegler et al. (2000). Our results suggest that, when there is less possibility of sublexical competition between similar spellings, homophone density effects are facilitatory. This outcome supports theoretical positions regarding the mental representation of homophones that assume a single representation for homophones at the phonological word form level.

Optical imaging of phonological processing in two distinct orthographies

Recent fMRI studies comparing the processing of alphabetic versus logographic scripts provide evidence for shared and orthography-specific regions of neural activity. The present study used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare (within and across brain regions) the time course of neural activation for these two distinct orthographies. Native readers of English and of Chinese were tested on a homophone judgment task. Differences across groups were obtained in the time course of hemodynamic change for the left middle frontal, left superior temporal, and left supramarginal gyri. Results thus support previous findings using fMRI and suggest that different neural mappings arise depending on whether an individual has learned to process written language using an alphabetic or logographic script.

Word Frequency Modulates the Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS) Effect in English Polysyllable Word Recognition.

Do native readers segment polysyllabic words based on orthographic/ morphological criteria or phonological criteria? Research by Taft (1979, 2001) argues in support of the former, as readers were faster in split-word lexical decision tasks when the words were segmented by orthographic/ morphological principles based on Basic Orthographic Syllable Structure (or BOSS) units than when they were phonologically segmented following the Maximum Onset Principle (MOP). However, a BOSS-based preference has been difficult to replicate. The present research examined three factors potentially modulating a BOSS-based segmentation preference: whether a given BOSS unit is or is not present in other words, reading experience, and word frequency. The results showed that across higher and lower ability readers, and across words with shared or unique BOSSes, a BOSS preference was reliably obtained in low but not in high frequency words. Thus, word frequency appears to modulate the segmentation strategy of polysyllabic English words.

Proverb preferences across cultures: dialecticality or poeticality?

Peng and Nisbett (1999) claimed that members of Asian cultures show a greater preference than Euro-Americans for proverbs expressing paradox (so-called dialectical proverbs; e.g.,Too humble is half proud). The present research sought to replicate this claim with the same set of stimuli used in Peng and Nisbett’s Experiment 2 and a new set of dialectical and nondialectical proverbs that were screened to be comparably pleasing in phrasing. Whereas the proverbs were rated as more familiar and (in Set 1) more poetic by Chinese than by American participants, no group differences were found in relation to proverb dialecticality. Both the Chinese and Americans in our study rated the dialectical proverbs from Peng and Nisbett’s study as more likable, higher in wisdom, and higher in poeticality than the nondialectical proverbs. For Set 2, both groups found the dialectical proverbs to be as likable, wise, and poetic as the nondialectical proverbs. When poeticality was covaried out, dialectical proverbs were liked better than nondialectical proverbs across both stimulus sets by the Chinese and the Americans alike, and when wisdom was covaried out, the effect of dialecticality was reduced in both sets and groups. Our findings indicate that caution should be taken in ascribing differences in proverb preferences solely to cultural differences in reasoning.

On the interpretation of alienable vs. inalienable possession: A psycholinguistic investigation*

Abstract Oceanic languages typically make a grammatical contrast between expressions of alienable and inalienable possession. Moreover, further distinctions are made in the alienable category but not in the inalienable category. The present research tests the hypothesis that there is a good motivation for such a development in the former case. As English does not have a grammaticalized distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, it provides a good testing ground. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, participants were asked to write down the first interpretation that came to mind for possessive phrases, some of which contained inherently relational possessums, while others contained possessums that are not inherently relational. Phrases with non-relational possessums elicited a broader range of interpretations and a lower consistency of a given interpretation across possessor modifiers than those with relational possessums. Study 2 demonstrated that users assign a default interpretation to a possessive phrase containing a relational possessum even when another reading is plausible. Study 3, a corpus-based analysis of possessive phrase use, showed that phrases with relational possessums have a narrower range of interpretations than those with other possessums. Taken together, the findings strongly suggest that grammatical distinctions between different types of alienable possession are motivated.

Examining the Phonological Neighborhood Density Effect Using Near Infrared Spectroscopy

Phonological density refers to the number of words that can be generated by replacing a phoneme in a target word with another phoneme in the same position. Although the precise nature of the phonological neighborhood density effect is not firmly established, many behavioral psycholinguistic studies have shown that visual recognition of individual words is influenced by the number and type of neighbors the words have. This study explored neurobehavioral correlates of phonological neighborhood density in skilled readers of English using near infrared spectroscopy. On the basis of a lexical decision task, our findings showed that words with many phonological neighbors (e.g., FRUIT) were recognized more slowly than words with few phonological neighbors (e.g., PROOF), and that words with many neighbors elicited significantly greater changes in blood oxygenation in the left than in the right hemisphere of the brain, specifically in the areas BA 22/39/40. In previous studies these brain areas have been implicated in fine‐grained phonological processing in readers of English. The present findings provide the first demonstration that areas BA 22/39/40 are also sensitive to phonological density effects. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010.

Does formal training in translation/interpreting affect translation strategy?: Evidence from idiom translation

This study examined whether training in translation/interpretation leads to a reliance on a ‘vertical’ translation strategy in which the source language text is comprehended before the message is reformulated. Students of translation/interpreting and untrained bilinguals were given an idiom translation judgment task with literal (form and meaning) or figurative equivalents (meaning only). Dependent measures included the time taken to comprehend the first presented sentence and the accuracy and speed of judging if the second presented sentence was a translation of the first sentence. The groups did not differ in their speed of reading the first presented sentence but translation verification times differed by group and translation type: untrained bilinguals were significantly faster at verifying literal than figurative translations while trained bilinguals were equally fast for the two types. The pattern of findings is consistent with the view that training in translation fosters a processing-for-meaning-before reformulating, or vertical, translation strategy.