Scientific article
OA Policy
English

Semantically related gestures facilitate language comprehension during simultaneous interpreting

Published inBilingualism, vol. 26, no. 2, p. 425-439
Publication date2023-03
First online date2022-10-10
Abstract

Manual co-speech gestures can facilitate language comprehension, but do they influence language comprehension in simultaneous interpreters, and if so, is this influence modulated by simultaneous interpreting (SI) and/or by interpreting experience? In a picture-matching task, 24 professional interpreters and 24 professional translators were exposed to utterances accompanied by semantically matching representational gestures, semantically unrelated pragmatic gestures, or no gestures while viewing passively (interpreters and translators) or during SI (interpreters only). During passive viewing, both groups were faster with semantically related than with semantically unrelated gestures. During SI, interpreters showed the same result. The results suggest that language comprehension is sensitive to the semantic relationship between speech and gesture, and facilitated when speech and gestures are semantically linked. This sensitivity is not modulated by SI or interpreting experience. Thus, despite simultaneous interpreters’ extreme language use, multimodal language processing facilitates comprehension in SI the same way as in all other language processing.

Keywords
  • Simultaneous interpreting
  • Language comprehension
  • Gestures
  • Multimodality
  • Bilingualism
Citation (ISO format)
ARBONA, Eléonore, SEEBER, Kilian, GULLBERG, Marianne. Semantically related gestures facilitate language comprehension during simultaneous interpreting. In: Bilingualism, 2023, vol. 26, n° 2, p. 425–439. doi: 10.1017/s136672892200058x
Main files (1)
Article (Published version)
Identifiers
Journal ISSN1366-7289
3views
38downloads

Technical informations

Creation06/05/2026 08:41:40
First validation07/05/2026 06:16:26
Update07/05/2026 06:16:26
Status update07/05/2026 06:16:26
Last indexation07/05/2026 06:16:28
All rights reserved by Archive ouverte UNIGE and the University of GenevaunigeBlack