Assessing mental demand in consecutive interpreting: Insights from an fNIRS study.

Consecutive interpreting involves a demanding language task where mental workload (MWL) is crucial for assessing interpreters' performance. An elevated cognitive load in interpreters may lead to the interpretation failures. The widely used NASA-TLX questionnaire effectively measures MWL. However, a global score was employed in previous interpretation studies, overlooking the distinct contributions of MWL components to the interpreters' performance. Accordingly, we recruited twenty novice interpreters who were postgraduate students specializing in interpreting to complete the consecutive interpreting task. Throughout the process, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to monitor the hemodynamic response in participants' brains. The NASA-TLX was used to measure the MWL during interpreting with six components, including mental demand, physical demand, temporal demand, performance, effort, and frustration. Five interpretation experts were invited to assess the interpretation quality. The Bayes factor approach was employed to explore the components that contributes the most to the interpretation quality. It indicated that mental demand strongly contributed to the interpretation quality. Moreover, the mediation analysis revealed a positive correlation between mental demand and brain activation in three brain areas, which, in turn, was negatively correlated with interpretation quality, indicating the predictive role of mental demand in interpretation quality through the mediating of brain activation. The functions of the mediating brain areas, including the inferior frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and inferior temporal gyrus, aligned with the three efforts proposed by Gile's effort model, which emphasizes the significance of three fundamental efforts in achieving successful interpreting. These findings have implications for interpreter learning and training.

Language specificity in the processing of affirmative and negative sentences.

OBJECTIVE: It is agreed that understanding a negative sentence elicits additional neural responses in reversing the truth of an embedded affirmative proposition. However, this argument is challenged by previous neuroimaging studies when distinct languages are used. Therefore, we intended to explore the language specificity of affirmative and negative sentence processing in this study. METHODS: We recruited a group of Chinese-English bilinguals to conduct a grammar judgment task of affirmative and negative sentences during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. And we kept syntactic complexity/sentence length matched in both affirmative and negative sentences. RESULTS: We found that negative sentences elicited more activation in the perisylvian region, which supported the 'truth reversing hypothesis' and argued the reversing process was implemented by the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. The significant language-by-sentence interaction effect in the inferior prefrontal cortex and rostral prefrontal cortex showed that sentential negation was influenced by distinctive language expression. CONCLUSION: These results demonstrated the 'truth reversing hypothesis'. Further analysis revealed the effect of language expression on the neural mechanism of sentential negation.