Lexical access in simultaneous interpreting trainees

Lexical access is of critical importance during simultaneous interpreting (SI) as rapid access can free up cognitive resources for other processes. It is unsurprising then that previous studies have found an advantage among professional interpreters compared to non-interpreters on tasks of lexical access. What remains unclear, however, is whether these advantages are stable or transient. The former would suggest that once the SI skill is acquired, the efficiency in lexical access remains even in the absence of further experience, while the latter would suggest that the SI skill needs to be continuously rehearsed to allow the maintenance of lexical benefits. To investigate this, students at various stages of interpreting training completed a verbal fluency task in their native language and a non-native language. We classified the students based on two factors: completion of the coursework for the Master in Conference Interpreting and recent practice with interpreting. These factors aimed to separate long-term from practice-dependent effects. We found that while training and recent practice did not modulate the number of items produced, these factors did influence the frequency of the items that were produced and when during the response period they were produced. Specifically, the students with no training and no practice and those with training and recent practice produced higher frequency words and exhausted the pool of available words earlier than students with only training or only recent practice. We suggest that this similar performance is due to different underlying language control processes, with a small vocabulary size most strongly driving the performance of the first group and low interference between the languages driving the performance of the second group. Beyond shedding light on language control in SI, these data also highlight the importance of examining non-canonical measures in the verbal fluency task.