Do Adult Simultaneous Bilinguals Outperform Adult Sequential Bilinguals in Simulated

375 Pages·2017·2.81 MB·English

Do Adult Simultaneous Bilinguals
Outperform Adult Sequential Bilinguals
in Simulated Experimental Bi-
Directional Simultaneous Interpreting
Tasks?

Alison Moore
October 2018

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for
the award of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Linguistic, Speech
and Communication Studies, The University of Dublin, Trinity
College
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Declaration

I declare that this thesis has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this
or any other university and is entirely my own work.
I agree to deposit this thesis in the University’s open access institutional
repository or allow the library to do so on my behalf, subject to Irish Copyright
Legislation and Trinity College Library conditions of use and acknowledgement.

__________________________________________________________
Alison Moore

October 2018
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Acknowledgements

First, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Lorna Carson, for her
guidance and encouragement throughout my doctoral studies. Secondly, I would
like to extend my thanks to all the volunteer bilingual participants who took part
in this project, along with the three interpreter raters who gave so freely of their
time and expertise. I would also like to thank friends and colleagues at the Centre
for Language and Communication Studies, Trinity College Dublin, for their
support during my studies. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, without
whom this Ph.D. would not have been possible.

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I dedicate this thesis to my mother, Heather Moore, with love.
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Summary

This thesis sets out to explore the possibility of an intra-bilingual advantage for
adult simultaneous bilinguals in simulated experimental bi-directional
simultaneous interpreting (SI) tasks. Research in Interpreting Studies skirts this
issue, having as its principal aims improved interpreter training or
interdisciplinary theoretical analysis and modelling of the SI activity itself.
Bilingualism Studies, however, offers decades of work in the areas of Second
Language Acquisition (SLA) and cognition on bilingual advantage, that is, a
bilingual advantage over monolinguals. Research in bilingualism has focused on
bilingual children, dating from early pedagogical concerns regarding best
classroom practices for integrating immigrant students into the educational
system. The study of bilingualism relied heavily on comparisons with bilinguals’
monolingual counterparts, and therefore bilinguals in monolingual mode, and
has established convincing arguments in cognitive terms for the existence of the
bilingual advantage. Increasingly, attention has turned to interdisciplinary
research on young adults, adults who have migrated by choice and adults with
brain injuries and ageing issues but, again, largely in monolingual mode or in
terms of regaining lost language skills or building cognitive reserves for the
future.

There is a notable paucity of work, therefore, which this thesis aims to address,
on non-immigrant adult bilinguals of working age, without medical conditions
and not in comparison with monolinguals. A further gap exists in the direct
comparison of simultaneous and sequential bilinguals with reference to a task as
comprehensive as bi-directional SI. Some recent studies have begun to compare
early and late bilinguals in other linguistic and cognitive settings, pointing to
other factors such as usage and balance which impinge on bilingual profiles but,
as yet, no research appears to have attempted a direct comparison in SI. There is
increasing interest in the issue of language directionality in interpreting but, once
again, no work contrasts simultaneous and sequential bilinguals.

Chapter 1 documents the rationale for this research and how research in both
interpreting and bilingualism combine to form the theoretical basis on which it
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is posited. Chapter 2 reviews the relevant literature, elucidating the role of age
of acquisition (AoA), the defining factor in this study, and the functional
relationship between the bilingual’s two languages, which lies at the heart of any
investigation of how they use their languages to perform SI. It highlights the
crucial importance of the individual profile of the bilingual due largely to
acquisition by domain, as proposed by Grosjean. It reviews research on language
storage, access and retrieval, takes into consideration Grosjean’s insistence that
understanding language mode is indispensable in any research on bilinguals and
uses his Interpreting Model to clarify bilingual mode in the SI activity. Chapter
3 portrays the complexities of the SI activity, isolating its components –
comprehension, processing and production - as distilled principally from the
work of two leading researchers, Seleskovich and Gile, and also with reference
to practical training manuals. The directionality debate is outlined and placed in
the context of ongoing controversy. Chapter 4 identifies the three data collection
instruments employed in the mixed-methods approach: the experimental SI task,
the Think-Aloud Protocols (TAP) related to the task and the questionnaire. It
details design procedures, the piloting phase and the data collection and
preparation procedures and their implementation. Chapter 5 identifies the
research population, presents the descriptive and inferential statistical analyses
of the overall and individual bi-directional SI task scores and compares
participant perceived dominance with pre- and post-task predictions on
directionality with their actual scores. Chapter 6 discusses the qualitative
findings of the research project. Two key themes emerged from the Think-Aloud
Protocols: The Bilingual Self, with its sub-themes of bilingual identity and
dominance, and the participants’ perspective on directionality; and Language
Storage, Access and Retrieval, along with the roles of ageing and attrition.
Chapter 7 responds to the research questions, synthesising the findings of both
data sets reported in Chapters 5 and 6. It shows that more unites the simultaneous
and sequential bilinguals than divides them and lists the set of factors found by
both groups to impact on their language profile and therefore influence their SI
performance. Chapter 8 evaluates the project’s findings and explores their
relevance within a discussion of theoretical framework employed. It notes
the contributions and limitations of the research and makes some suggestions
regarding possible future directions of related work.
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