An Eye-Tracking Study of Cognitive Effort in Processing of Lexical Features in Students and Experts

Abstract

In this paper, it is our aim to observe the impact that translator training and experience have on different groups of participants (novice, trained and experienced) when evaluating a translation. We will be doing so by measuring the cognitive effort invested by the participants in the processing of lexical features applying an eye-tracking methodology. Participants will be presented with several translated versions from English into Spanish done by translators with different levels of training and experience. This paper offers a detailed description of the experiment carried out. In it, we were also able to observe that while there are common patterns in the three groups, training and experience does have an impact on their behaviour when reading and assessing the different translated versions. We have been able to observe a link between these two factors and the amount of cognitive effort, which is higher in the group of students than in the group of experts, with trained participants leading the numbers, which we believe confirms the skill acquisition model proposed by Dreyfus (2004). Also, that extrinsic information is an element of disruption that influences the decisions made by participants, the amount of cognitive effort employed and how those lexical features have been processed.