Menzerath-Altmann Law in Consecutive and Simultaneous Interpreting: Insights into Varied Cognitive Processes and Load

ABSTRACT

Notwithstanding theoretical simulations of distinctive cognitive processes and load of consecutive (CI) and simultaneous interpreting (SI), quantitative linguistic inquiry into their outputs is needed for solid empirical evidence. As a fundamental law of quantitative linguistics, Menzerath–Altmann Law (MAL) mirrors the economic processing of linguistic information and complex dynamic language system. Given its extensive validation at various linguistic levels and predictive power of its parameters in register, language and authorship differentiation, MAL is worthy of being applied to interpreting studies. We endeavour to investigate whether interpreted languages follow the MAL and reveal varied cognitive load of CI versus SI, as manifested by different MAL fitting models. Results show that (1) both CI and SI outputs follow the MAL; (2) SI processing involves more diversified structural information and shows a greater tendency of shortening the clauses of a sentence with increased sentence length, than CI processing, expressed by significantly higher a and lower b in SI models than that in CI models. Our findings suggest the disparate language representations are shaped by cognitive capacity limitations and interpreting modalities, and reveal how language system dynamically re-regulates and reorganizes the linguistic information to accommodate environmental settings from the perspective of synergetic linguistics.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Science Data Bank at http://doi.org/10.11922/sciencedb.01378.

Notes

1. See online claws tagger at http://ucrel-api.lancaster.ac.uk/claws/free.html.

2. MAL modelling is conducted on the whole CI and SI sub-corpora in section 3.2, and on every separate text in both sub-corpora in section 3.3. SID refers to SI in Davos Forum and SIB stands for SI in Boao Forum in the figures.

3. Raw data of all MAL modelling results are available in Science Data Bank.

Additional information

Funding

The research is partly supported by the Philosophy and Social Sciences Project of Shaanxi Province [Grant No.2021ND0616].