Eye Will Tell You – How Gaze Aversion Reveals Trainee Interpreters’ Cognitive Load during Consecutive Interpreting Active Listening and Notetaking

Abstract

This thesis investigates trainee interpreters' Gaze Aversion (GA) - an overt strategy for regulating high cognitive load - from notepads during Consecutive Interpreting (CI) active listening and notetaking. The general aim of this project is to reveal the intricacy of GA in the context of CI active listening and notetaking and introduce it as a cognitive load indicator to Interpreting Studies. Specifically, the project fulfils several aims: to investigate if interpreters would conduct GA during active listening and notetaking when experiencing high cognitive load; to explore textual features that could potentially contribute to GA; to test if GA would enhance interpreters' performance. This PhD includes two studies: a corpus study and an experiment. The corpus study involved coding thirty videos of trainee interpreters performing English-to-Chinese CI. The experiment was conducted to corroborate the findings from the corpus study and further explore the intricacy of GA in a controlled environment. A mixed methods design involving the coding of GA, speech difficulty ratings, observation of features of the source text preceding GA, and priming was adopted for the investigation. Results indicate that GA was observed among participants, but the behaviour was subject to considerable individual differences. GA was associated with various preceding textual features, but complex syntactic structures and low-frequency words were potent GA inducers. Results also suggest that although GA reliably indicated trainee interpreters' high cognitive load, it did not enhance interpreting performance as hypothesised in previous studies. Instead, GA was associated with inferior renditions. The absence of performance-enhancing benefits could be explained by the possibility that trainee interpreters' cognitive load reached over a tipping point where GA would be futile in circumventing cognitive overload, suggesting that GA could indicate cognitive crisis.