Abstract

egorized for the community's nonlinguistic purposes or, to use his term, for the level of ##############. As Brown points out, the level of usual utility changes according to the demands of the linguistic community and this is especially true for expert populations. So, for example, while it is quite acceptable for most of us to refer to the object outside our office window as a "bird," if we were among a group of bird watchers, it would be important to specify whether the object was a "whitethroated " or "white-crown sparrow." Generally, experts prefer to identify objects in their domain of expertise more specifically than novices do. While few would argue that experts identify objects in their domain at a more specific level than novices, a separate question is whether experts initially recognize objects at this more specific level. In Section I of the chapter, we define object expertise as the ability to quickly and accurately recognize objects at specific or subordina

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