Yudes Gomez, C. , Bajo Molina, T. & Macizo Soria, P.
Department of Experimental Psychology. University of Granada, Spain.
In two experiments, we examined non-verbal executive processes of simultaneous interpreters, untrained bilinguals and monolingual speakers. Numerous studies with untrained bilinguals have shown superior performance of the bilinguals relative to the monolinguals in tasks that require conflict resolution such as the Simon or flanker tasks. The idea is that because bilingual speakers need in their daily life to exert executive control to select the appropriate language in the presence of interference from the other language, they develop more efficient executive processes that help them. This reasoning can also be applied to the professional language interpreters. Language interpretation is an extreme example of language control since the interpreter has to maintain the two language systems active in order to understand the source message in one language and to produce it in another language. Interestingly whereas most bilingual situation require selection of one language (and suppression of the other), interpreting requires strong coordination and flexibility to keep the two languages active and to switch from one language to the other. In consequence, we predicted that bilinguals would show advantages at inhibiting irrelevant information while professional interpreters would have superior cognitive flexibility in tasks requiring “shifting”. To test this hypothesis, we used the Wisconsin Card Sorting (WCST) and the Simon tasks to assess shifting and inhibitory control processes respectively. Consistent with our expectations, results in the WCST showed that interpreters were able to update task-relevant information more efficiently (fewer number of attempts to infer the rule, and smaller number of previous category perseverations) than the monolinguals and the bilinguals. However, interpreters and bilinguals did not differ in avoiding conflict information in the Simon task. The pattern of results is discussed in terms of the consequences of speaking two languages and the practice in simultaneous information for the functioning of cognitive processes.