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

Journal article

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.

Authors: Wynne, H; Emery, H

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Acta Psychologica
• Volume: 267
• Article number: 107031
• Publication date: 2026-05-09
• Acceptance date: 2026-05-07
• DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2026.107031
• EISSN: 1873-6297
• ISSN: 0001-6918
• Language: English
• Keywords: expertise; language; processing; aviation