Expertise,Working Memory and Articulatory Suppression Effect: Their Relation with Simultaneous Interpreting Performance

Simultaneous interpreting is a complex bilingual verbal activity that involvesthe auditory perception of an oral communication and the production of acoherent discourse. One of the cognitive functions underlying simultaneousinterpreting is working memory. The aim of this work was to study therelationship between expertise, working memory capacity and articulatorysuppression effect, and the ability to perform simultaneous interpreting. Forthis purpose, four working memory tasks and one simultaneous interpreting taskwere administered to thirty Spanish-speaking professional English interpreters.Results showed that simultaneous interpreting ability might be supported by theworking memory´s capacity to store or process information, but also by theability of the interpreter to cope with the articulatory suppression effect. Weconclude that interpreters may have or develop resources to support the effectcaused by articulatory suppression.