The effect of sound quality on attention and load in language tasks
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2022/13/0040/000582Keywords:
visual world paradigm, attentional shift, cognitive load, language comprehension, simultaneous interpretingAbstract
This paper reports the first part of the results of a study investigating the effect of sound quality on attention and cognitive load during different language-processing tasks. Forty-two professional conference interpreters completed three tasks — comprehension, production, and simultaneous interpreting of sentences — under both high-quality and low-quality audio conditions. The first sentence (e.g. “The man/woman is at the location”) was accompanied by a visual array containing three images: the smallest object (Target X), the larger object (Foil), and the largest object (Target Y). Gaze patterns and pupil diameter were measured during the second sentence (e.g. “The Target X is next to the Target Y”) using a blank-screen paradigm. Twelve visual arrays were presented for each task. The results showed that participants shifted their attention to the mentioned target earlier under adverse sound conditions in both the comprehension and interpreting tasks. In addition, cognitive load was found to be higher during simultaneous interpreting than during comprehension.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
