Delayed Auditory Feedback in Polyglot Simultaneous Interpreters

Twelve polyglot students of simultaneous interpretation and 12 controls (students of the faculty of Medicine) were submitted to a task of verbal fluency under amplified normal auditory feedback (NAF) and under three delayed auditory feedback (DAF) conditions with three different delay intervals (150, 200, and 250 msec). The control group showed a significant reduction in verbal fluency and a significant increase in the number of mistakes in all three DAF conditions. The interpreters' group, however, did not show any significant speech disruption neither in the subjects' mother tongue (L1) nor in their second language (L2) across all DAF conditions. Interpreters' general high verbal fluency along with their ability to pay less attention to their own verbal output make them more resistant to the interfering effects of DAF on speech.