Manual co-speech gestures can facilitate language comprehension, but do they influence language comprehension in simultaneous interpreters, and if so, is this influence modulated by simultaneous interpreting (SI) and/or by interpreting experience? In a picture-matching task, 24 professional interpreters and 24 professional translators were exposed to utterances accompanied by semantically matching representational gestures, semantically unrelated pragmatic gestures, or no gestures while viewing passively (interpreters and translators) or during SI (interpreters only). During passive viewing, both groups were faster with semantically related than with semantically unrelated gestures. During SI, interpreters showed the same result. The results suggest that language comprehension is sensitive to the semantic relationship between speech and gesture, and facilitated when speech and gestures are semantically linked. This sensitivity is not modulated by SI or interpreting experience. Thus, despite simultaneous interpreters’ extreme language use, multimodal language processing facilitates comprehension in SI the same way as in all other language processing.

手动同声手势可以促进语言理解，但它们会影响同声传译员的语言理解吗？如果是，这种影响是否受到同声传译 (SI) 和/或口译经验的调节？在一项图片匹配任务中，24 名专业口译员和 24 名专业笔译员在被动观看（口译员和笔译员）或在 SI 期间（仅口译员）接触伴随语义匹配的表征手势、语义不相关的语用手势或无手势的话语。在被动观看期间，两组在语义相关的手势上比在语义不相关的手势上更快。在 SI 期间，口译员显示了相同的结果。结果表明，语言理解对语音和手势之间的语义关系很敏感，当语音和手势在语义上联系起来时，就会得到促进。这种敏感性不受 SI 或口译经验的调节。因此，尽管同声传译员极端使用语言，但多模态语言处理以与所有其他语言处理相同的方式促进了 SI 中的理解。