A glimpse into the expert lexicon: Behavioural evidence from Aviation English

Using a specialised language is often an integral part of being an expert in a field (e.g. medicine, aviation). We employed an auditory sentence processing task with immediate recall to compare behavioural (RT, accuracy) responses by experts (pilots with more than 200 hours of training, N = 42) to non-experts (listeners with no training in the field, N = 54). Auditory stimuli were purpose-built to reproduce the standard aviation operating environment: recordings were produced by an aviation professional employing authentic radiotelephony cadence and mixed with simulated control-tower background noise. As expected, reaction times showed a clear effect of expertise: experts responded significantly faster on matched than mismatched trials, whereas non-experts showed no reliable effect. More importantly, accuracy analyses revealed that experts demonstrate strong sensitivity to phraseology, with significantly lower accuracy on recall tasks after hearing a single nonstandard word in an utterance than in all other conditions. Taken together, our results indicate that experts in aviation radiotelephony are principally sensitive to non-standard phraseology. These findings have implications not only for the organisation of the expert lexicon, but also the importance of using correct phraseology in the standard aviation environment.