Sex Differences in Ear-Voice-Span

Sex differences in memory tasks have been widely documented. Previous research has shown that women perform better than men in recall tasks (Maitland, 2004 ; Kimura et Seal, 2003), in word association tasks (Loonstra et al., 2001) and are more likely to use semantic organizational strategies during recall (Kramer et al.,1988). As memory plays a key role in simultaneous interpreting (Gile, 1995 inter alia), the question arises whether differences in memory performance are observable in interpreting data. Drawing on data from consecutive interpreting in a legal context, Mason (2008) suggests that the higher number of omissions in men's interpretations is due to memory limitations. Defrancq (2013) observed a longer EVS in female interpreters than in male interpreters in a corpus of interpreting data. EVS is generally held to be the time a concept is stored in working memory. Assuming interpreters make full use of their cognitive capacities (Gile's (1995) tight-rope hypothesis), including memory capacities, female interpreters are indeed expected to present a longer EVS than men. This study builds on Defrancq (2013), but is carried out with a significantly improved data set, both in terms of accuracy of EVS measuring and in terms of metadata. The data sample consists of 36 source texts (FR) and 36 interpretations (NL) performed at the European Parliament. Source speeches and interpretations are transcribed and aligned in EXMARaLDA Partitur-Editor. EVS measurement is based on 1819 time tags linking up lexical equivalents in the aligned acoustic signals of source and target text. The preliminary results from this study confirm Defrancq's (2013) findings: female interpreters on average have a longer EVS and the difference with male interpreters is statistically significant. Further analysis will be needed to take into account possible distorting factors, such as interpreters' fatigue, speakers' delivery rate, etc. References Defrancq, B. (2013). "Women and men interpreting" Paper read at "Talking to the World" Conference, Newcastle, September 2013. Gile, D. (1995). Regards sur la recherche en interprétation de conférence. Lille: PUL. Kimura, D., and Seal, B. (2003). Sex differences in recall of real or nonsense words. Pychological Reports, 93, pp. 263-264. Kramer, J., Delis, D., & Daniel, M. (1988). Sex differences in verbal learning. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 44, pp. 907-915. Loonstra, A., A. Tarlow & A. Sellers (2001). COWAT metanorms across age, education and gender. Applied neuropsychology, 8(3), pp 161-166 Maitland, S.B., Herlitz A., Nynberg L., Nilsson L-G. (2004). Selective sex differences in declarative memory. Memory & Cognition, 2004, 32(7), pp. 1160-1169 Mason, M. (2008). Courtroom interpreting. Maryland: UPA Moser-Mercer, B. (1978). "Simultaneous interpretation: A hypothetical model and its practical application." In: D. Gerver, and W. Sinaiko (eds.). Language interpretation and communication, New York: Plenum Press, pp. 353-368

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