The Effect of Speech Imageability and The Speaker's Gestures on The Simultaneous Interpreter's Gestures

Abstract

The investigation of cognitive effects of gestures during simultaneous interpreting holds high interdisciplinary value. This value stems from the primary cognitive function of gestures during speaking and listening. Gestures that accompany speech, gesticulations, enhance the comprehension of the listeners and the speaker’s thought formulating processes. Considering that simultaneous interpreters are concurrently both speakers and listeners, the quantitative investigation of their gesture production in a proper simultaneous interpreting enables the observation cognitive gesture functions in an extreme language task. Conducted experiment of the presented thesis investigates said functions in two main variables: the speaker’s gesture production frequency and the source speeches’ imageability, while introducing a new concept to the limited literature with the name of gesture synchronisation. Gesture synchronisation refers to the interpreters’ mimicking the speaker’s gesture both in terms of gesture type and timing. The analysed data highlights two main results. First, it highlights a predictive effect between the speaker’s gesture frequency and their synchronisation by the participant interpreters. Second, the data suggest an interaction between the source speeches’ imageability and the interpreters’ iconic gesture production, hinting at imageability related cognitive functions of iconic gestures. Gesticulations in this context have a cognitive function as the alone interpreter’s gesture production cannot be for communicative purposes. The presented thesis herein contributes to multiple disciplines in two veins, it demonstrates the cognitive functions of gestures in a simultaneous interpreting scenario with long interpretations and a relatively high number of participants and it introduces and demonstrates the concept of gesture synchronisation of simultaneous interpreters.