Five experiments are presented in this thesis. They investigate the impact of the interpreter's language exposure on the interpreter's fluency in simultaneous interpreting. The measurement of the interpreter's fluency involves a quantitative procedure developed by Kirsner and his colleagues (2002). The procedure is based on computer-assisted analyses of pause and speech segment durations and associated variables. The quantitative measures are employed to determine whether or not different levels of the language exposure influence fluency in simultaneous interpreting. The impact of the interpreter's language exposure is elaborated upon within the framework of dynamic systems theory. Experiment 1 is a pilot case study investigating the applicability of the methodology developed by Kirsner and his colleagues (2002, 2005) to the research in fluency in simultaneous interpreting. In Experiments 2-5 this methodology is extended to investigate the impact of the participants' language exposure on fluency in simultaneous interpreting involving various language pair combinations. Experiment 2 investigates the interpreter students' exposure to their third working language, Norwegian. It has been found that the participant's fluency in the experimental tasks critically depends on the amount of out-of-classroom language exposure, involving the language exposure to Swedish, a language typologically closely related to Norwegian. Experiment 3 investigates the impact of the interpreter students' language exposure gained during the stay abroad in Germany on their fluency in interpretation from/into German. Significant gains in fluency due to the stay abroad have been found between the groups of participants and their respective controls who studied German at their respective home universities. Experiments 4 and 5 explore the impact of the on-going language exposure to the interpreter's second language in the conditions of discontinuity in practicing simultaneous interpreting. The participants with the language pair combinations Finnish/Swedish (experiment 4) and English/Russian (experiment 5) have discontinued practicing simultaneous interpreting, yet enjoy a continuous exposure to their working languages. The participants have exhibited superior fluency measures compared to their respective controls (beginner and advanced students), and inferior fluency measures compared to the control group of professional interpreters. Data analysis of all the participants under all experimental conditions have not yielded any pause duration distributions specific to simultaneous interpreting.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Duquesne University, 2008. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-82) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-67).

Thesis (M.A)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2008. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-258). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-77). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Murdoch University, 2005. / Thesis submitted to the Division of Arts. Bibliography: leaves 372-386.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Auburn University, 2008. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 55-63).

Difficulties in speech production are often marked by disfluency; fillers, hesitations, prolongations, repetitions and repairs. In recent years a body of work has emerged that demonstrates that listeners are sensitive to disfluency, and that this affects their expectations for upcoming speech, as well as their attention to the speech stream. This thesis investigates the extent to which delay may be responsible for triggering these effects. The experiments reported in this thesis build on an Event Related Potential (ERP) paradigm developed by Corley et al., (2007), in which participants listened to sentences manipulated by both fluency and predictability. Corley et al. reported an attenuated N400 effect for words following disfluent ers, and interpreted this as indicating that the extent to which listeners made predictions was reduced following an er. In the current set of experiments, various noisy interruptions were added to Corley et al.,'s paradigm, time matched to the disfluent fillers. These manipulations allowed investigation of whether the same effects could be triggered by delay alone, in the absence of a cue indicating that the speaker was experiencing difficulty. The first experiment, which contrasted disfluent ers with artificial beeps, revealed a small but significant reduction in N400 effect amplitude for words affected by ers but not by beeps. The second experiment, in which ers were contrasted with speaker generated coughs, revealed no fluency effects on the N400 effect. A third experiment combined the designs of Experiments 1 and 2 to verify whether the difference between them could be characterised as a context effect; one potential explanation for the difference between the outcomes of Experiments 1 and 2 is that the interpretation of an er is affected by the surrounding stimuli. However, in Experiment 3, once again no effect of fluency on the magnitude of the N400 effect was found. Taken together, the results of these three studies lead to the question of whether er's attenuation effect on the N400 is robust. In a second part to each study, listeners took part in a surprise recognition memory test, comprising words which had been the critical words in the previous task intermixed with new words which had not appeared anywhere in the sentences previously heard. Participants were significantly more successful at recognising words which had been unpredictable in their contexts, and, importantly, for Experiments 1 and 2, were significantly more successful at recognising words which had featured in disfluent or interrupted sentences. There was no difference between the recognition rates of words which had been disfluent and those which were affected by a noisy interruption. Collard et al., (2008) demonstrated that disfluency could raise attention to the speech stream, and the finding that interrupted words are equally well remembered leads to the suggestion that any noisy interruption can raise attention. Overall, the finding of memory benefits in response to disfluency, in the absence of attenuated N400 effects leads to the suggestion that different elements of disfluencies may be responsible for triggering these effects. The studies in this thesis also extend previous work by being designed to yield enough trials in the memory test portion of each experiment to permit ERP analysis of the memory data. Whilst clear ERP memory effects remained elusive, important progress was made in that memory ERPs were generated from a disfluency paradigm, and this provided a testing ground on which to demonstrate the use of linear mixed-effects modelling as an alternative to ANOVA analysis for ERPs. Mixed-effects models allow the analysis of unbalanced datasets, such as those generated in many memory experiments. Additionally, we demonstrate the ability to include crossed random effects for subjects and items, and when this is applied to the ERPs from the listening section of Experiment 1, the effect of fluency on N400 amplitude is no longer significant. Taken together, the results from the studies reported in this thesis suggest that temporal delay or disruption in speech can trigger raised attention, but do not necessarily trigger changes in listeners' expectations.