Too fast to be true? Exploring time compression in simultaneous interpreting

• Time-compressed speech seems easier to understand than fast natural speech.
• Interpreters rendered a time-compressed and a fast natural version of a speech.
• The time-compressed version was harder to interpret than the fast natural version.

When speaking fast, we tend to reduce sentence-ending pauses, potentially impinging on their function as cues for the listener. Earlier research indicates that fast natural speech is harder to process than time-compressed speech, in which all pauses are reduced proportionally. To check whether this advantage for listening withstands the high cognitive demands of simultaneous interpreting, we set up an experiment using two videotaped versions of a content-rich speech. One was delivered by the speaker at 166 words/min and the other one was an originally slower presentation made similarly fast using a 20% compression rate. We asked eight professional practitioners to interpret both versions and to estimate their interpreting difficulty in terms of several dimensions. When the two versions were presented separately, the subjects perceived the time-compressed recording as harder to interpret with regard to linguistic expression. When comparing them, they perceived the time-compressed version either as similarly or as more difficult to interpret than the fast natural version. These results cast doubts on the conjectured advantage of time compression for the interpretation of content-rich speeches.