Exploring the Impact of Anxiety on Chinese‐English Consecutive Interpreting: Cognitive Trade‐Off Patterns

ABSTRACT Interpreting is a cognitively demanding activity that can elicit heightened anxiety, particularly among student interpreters. Although prior research has linked anxiety to performance deficits, little is known about its differential effects across linguistic dimensions and the potential cognitive trade‐offs under varying task conditions. This study, employing a mixed‐methods design, examines the impact of anxiety on Chinese‐English consecutive interpreting, focusing on lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and speech disfluency and examining the moderating role of topic familiarity. Forty‐two graduate students in Translation and Interpreting Program completed two consecutive interpreting tasks differing in topic familiarity, followed by assessments using Interpreting Anxiety Scale and NASA‐TLX cognitive load measurement and semi‐structured interviews. Linear mixed‐effects models revealed that anxiety significantly increased speech disfluency, with topic familiarity moderating this effect. In contrast, lexical diversity and syntactic complexity remained largely stable, except for selective interactions with cognitive load. Qualitative analysis corroborated these findings, indicating that students primarily attributed their anxiety to task‐intrinsic and social‐evaluative pressures and relied mainly on pre‐task preparation and in‐task compensation. These results lend empirical support to Attentional Control Theory, suggesting that anxiety diverts executive resources, disproportionately affecting fluency while preserving structural integrity, and underscore the role of topic familiarity as a contextual buffer against anxiety‐induced performance degradation.