Language training may produce effects in cognitive control (e.g., bilingual advantage, interpreter advantage) and language competence (e.g., lexical diversity, interpreting competence). We are interested in the question of how these effects may emerge or in what ways. We take interpreting training as an example. A series of studies (e.g. Mellinger & Hanson, 2019; Wen & Dong, 2019; Dong, Liu & Cai, 2018) show that interpreting training may help enhance working memory (WM), but taking all relevant literature into account, it seems that the emergence of this WM advantage is not straightforward, with updating first enhanced and WM spans enhanced later. A more tricking case is the effect of interpreting training on cognitive flexibility (e.g., Zhao & Dong 2020). It seems that interpreting training first enhances local control in cognitive flexibility (indexed by switch cost), which is then replaced by global monitoring (indexed by mixing cost). These studies show the nature of interpreting training in terms of cognitive control. But, interpreting training aims to improve interpreting competence, not cognitive control. With correlational analysis and structural equation modeling, Yu and Dong (accepted) shows interpreting training is a process of mobilizing and then integrating component competences (e.g, language proficiency, WM). Implications are discussed about general language training.

Bio

Dr. Dong Yanping is Dean and Professor of Psycholinguistics and Doctoral Supervisor at the School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, China. Prof. Dong is laureate of "Leading Scholar in Liberal Arts" awarded by Zhejiang University, Vice President of the Chinese Association for Comparative Studies of English and Chinese (2014-), founding President of the Chinese Association of Psycholinguistics (2011-). She serves on the editorial board of "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" (2010-), the advisory board of John Benjamin's' book series "Bilingual Processing and Acquisition" (2010-), and the consultant for The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Interpreting, and Bilingualism, etc. Professor Dong's broad research interests span across psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, second language acquisition, translatology, gerontolinguistics, having conducted and published numerous researches in the psycholinguistics of bilingualism.