This study focuses on the importance of the syntactic structure of an oral
text in the cognitive processes underlying simultaneous interpretation.
The experimental paradigm chosen for this study was devised by the
American researcher Robert Jarvella at the beginning of the 70's. The experiments carried out by Jarvella centre on 'immediate recall' tasks,
aiming at assessing the influence of formai structures on speech processing. The
first finding of Jarvella's studies was listeners' tendency to segment the
incoming information into chunks, corresponding to the syntactic segmentation
into 'clauses' and 'sentences'.
