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[email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Corpus-based research into the presumed effects of short EVS Bart Defrancq Ghent University The aim of this study, based on 32 French speeches simultaneously interpreted into Dutch at plenary sessions of the European Parliament in late 2008, was to ascertain whether short ear-voice span (EVS) affects the quality of the interpre- tation as is commonly stated in the literature. The speeches and interpretations were taken from the ‘EPIC Ghent’ corpus, which is in preparation at Ghent University. Three phenomena were identified as potential effects of a short EVS: syntactic transcodage (maintaining the right-branching French ‘noun+de+noun’ structure, not using a more natural left-branching structure, in the Dutch inter- pretation), use of cognates similar in sound to source language forms (‘glissement phonétique’), and certain self-repairs (Barik 1973; Gile 1995).