Unpacking the multilingualism continuum: An investigation of language variety co-activation in simultaneous interpreters

This study examines the phonological co-activation of a task-irrelevant language variety in mono- and bivarietal speakers of German with and without simultaneous interpreting (SI) experience during German comprehension and production. Assuming that language varieties in bivarietal speakers are co-activated analogously to the co-activation observed in bilinguals, the hypothesis was tested in the Visual World paradigm. Bivarietalism and SI experience were expected to affect co-activation, as bivarietalism requires communication-context based language-variety selection, while SI hinges on concurrent comprehension and production in two languages; task type was not expected to affect co-activation as previous evidence suggests the phenomenon occurs during comprehension and production. Sixty-four native speakers of German participated in an eye-tracking study and completed a comprehension and a production task. Half of the participants were trained interpreters and half of each sub-group were also speakers of Swiss German (i.e., bivarietal speakers). For comprehension, a growth-curve analysis of fixation proportions on phonological competitors revealed cross-variety co-activation, corroborating the hypothesis that co-activation in bivarietals’ minds bears similar traits to language co-activation in multilingual minds. Conversely, co-activation differences were not attributable to SI experience, but rather to differences in language-variety use. Contrary to expectations, no evidence for phonological competition was found for either same- nor cross-variety competitors in either production task (interpreting- and word-naming variety). While phonological co-activation during production cannot be excluded based on our data, exploring the effects of additional demands involved in a production task hinging on a language-transfer component (oral translation from English to Standard German) merit further exploration in the light of a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of the SI task.