Ericsson 2000

<LINK "eri-r11">
<TARGET "eri" DOCINFO AUTHOR "K. Anders Ericsson"TITLE "Expertise in interpreting"SUBJECT "INTP, Volume 5:2"KEYWORDS ""SIZE HEIGHT "220"WIDTH "150"VOFFSET "4">
Expertise in interpreting
An expert-performance perspective
K. Anders Ericsson
Florida State University, Florida & Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California
This paper describes how the expert-performance perspective differs from

the common-sense view of professional ability and how this approach can be
applied to the study of professional interpreting. The expert-performance
approach is first introduced with findings from many traditional domains of
expertise, such as chess, music, medicine, and sports. Most importantly,
expert performance is shown to be primarily acquired through the engage-
ment in designed training activities, namely deliberate practice (Ericsson et
al., 1993). The second part of the paper briefly discusses earlier research on
expert interpreting motivated by more traditional views of expertise in
interpreting. Finally, the expert-performance approach is applied to the
study of superior interpreting performance and potential studies of superior
interpreting under representative conditions are outlined.
Experience is necessary for individuals to improve their performance in any

domain of expertise. When individuals are first introduced to a professional
domain after completing training and education they are often overwhelmed
and rely on help from others. After months and sometimes years of experience
individuals attain a level of acceptable proficiency and are able to work inde-
pendently and further develop their professional reputation. Although all
individuals improve with experience in any domain, some individuals develop
faster than others and after years of experience are viewed as experts and
masters. In contrast, after years of practice, other individuals eventually reach
a stable mediocre level that is maintained for the rest of their careers. These
individual differences in attained levels of performance are not fully under-
stood. The most common explanation is that individuals’ potential or attainable
achievement in a given domain is limited by factors that cannot be changed
Interpreting 5:2 (2000/01), 187–220.
issn 1384–6647 / e-issn 1569–982X© John Benjamins Publishing Company
<LINK "eri-r11">
"eri-r13">
"eri-r14">
"eri-r21">
"eri-r45">
190 K. Anders Ericsson
through experience and training, namely, their basic endowment, such as

abilities, mental capacities and innate talents. Within this common-sense view
of professional development the focus has been on identifying those individuals
with the necessary innate talents that would allow them to reach expert levels
with experience. Therefore, the best schools and professional organizations
nearly always rely on extensive testing and interviews to identify the most
talented applicants.
In a few recent reviews my colleagues and I (Ericsson & Charness, 1994;
Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch Romer, 1993) traced this common-sense view back
Galton’s (1869/1979) seminal book on “Hereditary Genius”. These reviews
documented that this view is still advocated by the main contemporary theories
of human ability, such as Howard Gardner’s (1983, 1993) theory of Multiple
Intelligences. The subsequent debate between us and Howard Gardner
(Ericsson & Charness, 1995; Gardner, 1995), the interchange between Robert
Sternberg (1996) and me (Ericsson, 1996), and the lead article and commentar-
ies in Brain and Behavioral Science (Howe, Davidson, & Sloboda, 1998,
Ericsson , 1998) validates the relevance and controversies over the role of limits
set by innate abilities. Sternberg (1996, p. 349) nicely captured the enduring
common-sense view: “Without the ability, hours of practice can be for minimal
or no rewards”.
Recent criticisms of the common-sense view

of professional development
During the last couple of decades several theoretical developments have

questioned the common-sense view of professional development and have
carefully examined the empirical evidence cited in its support. Recent reviews
(Ericsson, 1998; Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996; Ericsson et al., 1993) have shown
that the firm empirical evidence backing the common-sense view of profession-
al development is surprisingly limited and the available evidence is sometimes
even inconsistent with the assumptions of this view of expert performance.
First, in many domains the assessment of expertise is questionable because
individuals’ reputation and their level of training are often used as substitutes
for individuals’ level of expert performance. Most alarmingly, these social
indicators of expertise do not relate closely to objective measures of representa-
tive performance. For example, the length of training and professional experi-
ence of the clinical psychologist is not related to their efficiency and success of
<LINK "eri-r34">
"eri-r8">
"eri-r15">
"eri-r46">
"eri-r11">
"eri-r3">
Expertise in interpreting 191
treating patients (Dawes 1994). Similarly, when wine experts are required to
detect, describe, and discriminate characteristics of wines without knowledge of
its identity (seeing the label on the bottle) their performance is only slightly
better than those generated by regular wine drinkers (Gawel, 1997; Valentin,
Pichon, de Boishebert, & Abdi, 2000). More generally, the accuracy of decision-
making involved in medical diagnosis for common diseases, and in investment
in the stock market do not improve with further professional experience or
social status within the respective domain (Ericsson & Lehmann 1996).
Second, the fixed limits, assumed by the common-sense view of profession-
al development, are not consistent with observed ability of individuals to
improve their performance through training. Research has shown that when
highly experienced individuals are appropriately motivated they are able to
improve their objective performance, sometimes dramatically (Ericsson,
Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993). Finally, it has been surprisingly difficult to use
measurements of innate talents to predict adult professional achievement.
These efforts have been disappointing and largely unsuccessful (Ericsson &
Lehmann, 1996). There is now evidence that shows that most successful
selection programs in sports are systematically biased by factors unrelated to
talent. For example, professional athletes in soccer and ice-hockey have been
found to be born much more frequently (3–6 times) in some months of the
year than other months (Boucher & Mutimer, 1994). The factors determining
this “birth-date” effect are now widely accepted. When children start participat-
ing in sports they are nearly always grouped together in age cohorts. For
example, children born between January 1st and December 31st in a year are
grouped together to form teams in hockey. Consequently, the oldest children in
that cohort will be almost one year older than the youngest children in the same
age cohort. Children often start to compete at young ages, such as around six
years of age. At that young age one additional year of development will result in
considerable differences between children in the same cohort. In fact, some
seven-year olds will be competing with six-year olds. Coaches who are unaware
of the birth dates of the children tend to perceive the oldest and most physically
mature children within an age cohort as more talented. The older children are
thus more frequently selected into talent-development groups at a young age.
Selection into these talent-development groups allows children access to better
training resources which, in turn, facilitates the development of their perfor-
mance. A recent review by Musch and Hay (1999) has now fairly conclusively
linked the birth-date effect to the relative age of children competing withing the
same age cohort. The most compelling evidence comes from a recent study
<LINK "eri-r11">
"eri-r18">
(Helsen, Starkes & Winckel, 2000) that has analyzed a natural experiment, when
the dates defining the age cohorts have been changed. In Belgium, the age
cohort for soccer players originally consisting of all children born from August
1st to July 31st, where children born in August, September and October were
highly successful. This age cohort was changed in 1997 to children born from
January 1st to December 31st. Within a single year children born in January to
March showed a dramatically increased selection and emerged as the most
highly selected among the young soccer players.
It has been very difficult to find characteristics of individuals that are
critical to attaining expert performance yet are innately determined and cannot
be modified extensively by training. Although it was long believed that most
physical characteristics, such as the proportion of fast and slow twitch muscle
fibers, sizes of hearts, number or muscle fibers, and aerobic power, were
primarily determined innately, more recent research has now uncovered how
these characteristics can be modified by extended intense training (Ericsson,
2003a, 2003b, in press). The only such characteristics that are generally accepted
to be determined by innate genetic factors and critical to successful expert
performance are body size and height (Ericsson, 1990, 1996), where above
average height provides an advantage in basketball and below average height
facilitates elite performance in gymnastics.
Outline of paper
The findings discussed in the previous section of this paper, raise doubts about
the common-sense view of professional development and suggest that highly
motivated individuals can influence their attained level of performance to a
much greater degree than traditionally assumed. If this is true then it would be
very interesting to study the performance of highly accomplished individuals.
In particular, it would be informative to study in more detail how elite individ-
uals attained their expert levels of achievement.
In this paper I will examine how the expert-performance perspective can be
applied to the professional domain of translation and interpreting. Given that
I have not conducted research in this domain of expertise I will outline how the
structure and acquisition of expert performance in interpreting might be
studied. Following the structure of a recent chapter that applied the expert-
performance perspective to another domain of which I had essentially no
personal knowledge, namely golf (Ericsson, 2001), I will organize the paper into
<LINK "eri-r11">
two parts. In the first part of this paper I will briefly outline how the expert-
performance approach was developed in other domains of expertise, such as
chess, music, medicine, and sports. I will then briefly describe the evidence
supporting the claim that expert performance in these domains is primarily
acquired through the engagement in designed training activities, namely
deliberate practice (Ericsson et al., 1993). In the second part of the paper I will
propose how researchers using the expert-performance approach have attempt-
ed to address some of the problems emerging from studies in the traditional
expertise approach. I will also sketch how the expert performance approach
may be extended to studies of superior performance in interpreting under
representative conditions.
The scientific study of expert performance and its acquisition
From childhood almost everyone has heard amazing anecdotes about the
achievements of athletes, musicians and scientists. When the proposed scientific
evidence for the most amazing achievements is scrutinized, most of these
incidents cannot even be substantiated by independent and unbiased sources
(Ericsson, 1996). Often the only sources of these anecdotes were the exceptional
persons themselves telling stories about their childhood when interviewed as
adults. In other cases, the individuals observing the event may have misinter-
preted what actually happened. For example, when a PGA golfer sinks a 40-ft
putt to win a golf tournament, it is often assumed that he did so because of his
amazing ability to control his hitting action. In fact, some professional golfers
claim that they can reproduce their shots exactly, at least when they are “hot”
(Ericsson, 2001b). However, when scientists have set up experimental tests
asking elite golfers to hit the same shot 10–20 times, it becomes clear that
although the consistency of their shots is higher than that of less skilled golfers,
their shots are still quite variable. Hence, world-class golfers acquire knowledge
about the inherent variability of their respective shots and develop strategies
(course management) that take this variability into account to minimize the
shots necessary to complete a given golf course. In order to build a science of
exceptional performance it is necessary to restrict the scientific evidence to
phenomena that can be repeatedly and reliably observed, and preferably
reproduced and analyzed under standardized conditions in the laboratory.
It is possible to objectively measure expert performance and reproduce such
superior performance under controlled laboratory conditions (see Ericsson and
<LINK "eri-r11">
Smith, 1991, for an extended discussion)? Many types of superior performance

by experts are spontaneously reproduced repeatedly in everyday life. For
example, elite runners who finish the mile in less than four minutes can
reproduce their exceptional performance repeatedly at different track competi-
tions. Athletic competition has a long history of attempting to design standardized
situations that will allow fair competition between athletes. The same is true for
competitions in music, dance, and chess. In all of these domains, elite individu-
als very reliably outperform less accomplished individuals. In most individual
sporting events, such as track, swimming, and golf, one can easily compare
athletes’ performance on traditional measures, such as speed and accuracy.
Expert performers can reliably reproduce their performance anytime when
required such as during competitions and training. Ericsson and Smith (1991)
described how it is possible to design representative tasks that capture the
essence of expertise where experts can repeatedly reproduce their superior
performance under controlled laboratory conditions. For example, one can
present chess players with unfamiliar chess positions and instruct them to select
the best move. Ability to select the best chess moves is closely correlated with
chess ratings for playing chess tournaments. Similarly, one can present doctors
with descriptions of medical patients’ symptoms and ask them to make the
correct diagnosis. Snooker players can be asked to make several shots for each
of a series of fixed configurations of billiard balls, and golfers can be asked to
make several putts for each of many ball locations on a green (Ericsson, 2001b).
In most domains it is possible to identify a collection of representative tasks that
capture the essence of expertise in a domain and that can be administered to all
participants under controlled and standardized conditions.
The acquisition of superior reproducible (expert) performance

It is possible to identify several claims about expertise that generalize across
different domains when we consider only the superior, reproducible perfor-
mance of experts that can be measured during development (Ericsson, 1996;
Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996).
First, longitudinal assessments of performance reveal that the level of
achievement increases gradually. There is no evidence for abrupt improvements
in performance from one time to the next even when the performance of child
prodigies in music and chess are considered. Second, the age at which experts
typically reach their peak career performance is the middle to late 20s for many
vigorous sports, and a decade later, in the 30s and 40s, for the arts and sciences.
<LINK "eri-r11">
"eri-r43">
"eri-r2">
"eri-r30">
This continued, often extended, development implies that the best individuals
are able to engage in practice activities that lead to improvements in perfor-
mance even when physical maturation is completed at around age 18. Finally,
the most compelling evidence for the requirement of engagement in domain-
related activities prior to attaining high levels of performance is that even the
most “talented” need around ten years of intense involvement before they reach
an international level in sports, sciences, and the arts (Ericsson et al., 1993, Simon
and Chase, 1973). Interestingly, most elite individuals take considerably longer
than 10 years of intensive practice to reach an international level.
From retrospective interviews of international-level performers in several
domains, Bloom and his colleagues showed that elite performers are typically
introduced to their future domain in a playful manner. As soon as they enjoy
the activity and show promise (compared to peers in the neighborhood), they
are encouraged to seek out a teacher and initiate regular practice. Based on their
interviews, Bloom (1985) argued that access to the best training resources is
necessary to reach the highest levels.
The best evidence for the value of current training methods and practice
schedules comes from historical comparisons (Ericsson, 2001b; Lehmann &
Ericsson, 1998). The most dramatic improvements in the level of performance
over historical time are found in sports. In competitions such as the marathon
and swimming events, many serious amateurs of today could easily beat the
gold medal winners of the early Olympic Games.
To further explore these issues, Ralf Krampe, Clemens Tesch-Römer, and I
(Ericsson et al., 1993) tried to identify those training activities most closely
associated with optimal improvement of performance and classified them as
deliberate practice. Let us first consider some characteristics of effective practice.
Based on a review of laboratory studies of learning and skill acquisition
during the last century, we found that improvement of performance was
uniformly observed when individuals, who were motivated to improve their
performance, were given well-defined tasks, were provided with feedback, and had
ample opportunities for repetition. Individuals were often able to keep improving
during a series of training sessions as long as the sessions were limited to around an
hour — the time that college students could maintain sufficient concentration to
make active efforts to improve. These deliberate efforts to increase one’s perfor-
mance beyond its current level involve problem solving and finding better
methods to perform the tasks. Engaging in an activity with the primary goal of
improving some aspect of performance is a prerequisite of deliberate practice.
<LINK "eri-r38">
"eri-r11">
"eri-r18">
"eri-r28">
For an overview of the essential characteristics of deliberate practice its mediating

mechanisms, the reader is referred to recent reviews (Ericsson, 2001b, 2002).
The importance of deliberate practice in attaining expert performance was
first demonstrated in a study of three groups of expert musicians who differed
in level of attained music performance. We (Ericsson et al., 1993) examined
how expert musicians spent their daily lives by interviewing them and having
them keep detailed diaries for a week. Although all expert musicians were found
to spend about the same amount of time on all types of music-related activities,
the two most accomplished groups of expert musicians were found to spend
more time in solitary practice. When the expert musicians practiced by them-
selves on practice tasks assigned to them by their music teachers, they focused
(with full concentration) on improving specific aspects of the music perfor-
mance, thus meeting the criteria for deliberate practice. The best groups of
expert musicians spent around 4 hours every day, including weekends, in this
type of solitary practice. From retrospective estimates of practice, Ericsson et al.
(1993) calculated the number of hours of deliberate practice that five groups of
musicians at different performance levels had accumulated by a given age, as is
illustrated in Figure 1. By the age of 20, the most accomplished musicians had
spent over 10,000 hours of practice, which is 2,500 and 5,000 hours more than
two less accomplished groups of expert musicians or 8,000 hours more than
amateur pianists of the same age (Krampe & Ericsson, 1996).
Several subsequent studies have found a consistent correlation between the
level of attained performance and the amount and quality of solitary activities
meeting the criteria of deliberate practice in many types of domains (Ericsson,
1996, 2001b, 2002; Helsen, Starkes, & Hodges, 1998). The concept of deliberate
practice also accounts for individual differences in the maintenance of expert
performance (Krampe & Ericsson, 1996). It also is consistent with the findings
from longitudinal studies of elite athletes (Schneider, 1993).
The complex mechanisms mediating expert performance and

their acquisition through deliberate practice
In this section I will attempt to explain why most individuals’ increases in
performance asymptote within months whereas the expert performers are able
to keep improving their performance for years and decades.
When individuals are first introduced to an activity their primary goal is to
reach some level of mastery that is sufficient to allow them to engage in playful
activities with their friends or meaningful activities with their professional
<LINK "eri-r12">
11000
10000 Violinists
Professionals
9000 Best Experts
Good Experts
Estimated Accumulated
8000 Least Accomplished Experts

Practice (Hours)
7000 Pianists
Amateurs
6000
5000
4000
3000
2000
1000
0
4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
Age of the Musicians (Years)
Figure 1.Estimated amount of time for solitary practice as a function of age for the
middle-aged professional violinists (triangles), the best expert violinists (squares), the
good expert violinists (empty circles), the least accomplished expert violinists (filled
circles) and amateur pianists (diamonds). (From “The role of deliberate practice in the
acquisition of expert performance,” by K. A. Ericsson, R. Th. Krampe and C. Tesch-
Römer, 1993, Psychological Review, 100(3), p. 379 and p. 384. Copyright 1993 by
American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission.)
associates. During the first phase of learning and skill acquisition (Fitts &
Posner, 1967), individuals need to concentrate on what they are going to do in
order to reduce gross mistakes, as is illustrated at the lower arm of Figure 2.
With more experience their obvious mistakes become increasingly rare, their
performance appears smoother, and they no longer need to concentrate as hard
to perform at an acceptable level. After some limited period of training and
experience — frequently less than 50 hours for most recreational and everyday
activities, such as skiing, tennis, and driving a car — an acceptable standard of
performance is attained without much need for effortful attention. As
individuals’ behavior is adapted to the performance demands and is increasing-
ly automated, they no longer exert conscious control and lose the ability to
make specific intentional adjustments. For example, people do not know how
they tie their shoelaces or how they stand up from sitting in a chair. Under
those circumstances, further experience will not be associated with any marked
improvements and amount of accumulated experience will not be related to

attained level of performance.
In direct contrast, expert performance continues to improve as a function
of more experience coupled with deliberate practice. The key challenge for
aspiring expert performers is to avoid the arrested development associated with
automaticity and to acquire cognitive skills to support their continued learning
and improvement. The expert performer actively counteracts the tendencies
toward automaticity by actively acquiring and refining cognitive mechanisms
to support continued learning and improvement, as is shown in the upper arm
of Figure 2. The experts deliberately construct and seek out training situations
Expert
Performance
Performance
Arrested
Development
Everyday
Skills
Experience
Figure 2.An illustration of the qualitative difference between the course of improve-
ment of expert performance and of everyday activities. The goal for everyday activities
is to reach as rapidly as possible a satisfactory level that is stable and “autonomous”.
After individuals pass through the “cognitive” and “associative” phases they can
generated their performance virtually automatically with a minimal amount of effort
(see the gray/white plateau at the bottom of the graph). In contrast, expert performers
counteract automaticity by developing increasingly complex mental representations to
attain higher levels of control of their performance and will therefore remain within the
“cognitive” and “associative “phases. Some experts will at some point in their career give
up their commitment to seeking excellence and thus terminate regular engagement in
deliberate practice to further improve performance which results in premature automa-
tion of their performance. (Adapted from “The scientific study of expert levels of
performance: General implications for optimal learning and creativity” by K. A. Ericsson
in High Ability Studies, 9, p. 90. Copyright 1998 by European Council for High Ability).
<LINK "eri-r11">
"eri-r9">
in which the desired goal exceeds their current level of performance. They
acquire mechanisms that are designed to increase their control and ability to
monitor performance in representative situations from the domain of expertise
(Ericsson, 1998, 2001b, 2002).
Although the structure of these mechanisms reflect general principles, their
detailed structure and the detailed practice activities that mediate their acquisi-
tion will differ from one domain of expertise to another. Therefore I have
selected two domains of expertise, namely chess and typing, out of a very large
number of domains that have been studied (Ericsson, 1996, 2001b, 2002;
Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). For each domain I will outline how the expert
performance was captured with representative tasks in the laboratory. Then I
will briefly describe how their mediating acquired mechanisms were identified
and how these mechanisms probably have been acquired by deliberate practice.
I will first discuss chess and then typing.
Chess. The domain of expertise in chess is often viewed as one of the most
cognitively demanding activities, and it is often seen as a prototype of superior
intelligence. A chess master seems to be able to understand all aspects of any
chess position and can thus easily anticipate every plan of attack by less skilled
players. Is it possible to uncover the detailed processes that allow world-class
chess players to analyze chess positions and to find their best move for each
position? In his pioneering work on chess expertise, de Groot (1946/1978)
instructed expert and world-class players to “think aloud” while selecting the
best move in a set of unfamiliar chess positions. He found that the quality of the
selected moves was closely associated with the performers’ play in tournaments
and thus captured the essence of chess skill. The players’ “think aloud” proto-
cols revealed that the players first formed a rapid impression of the chess
position and then retrieved potential moves from memory. The promising
moves were then evaluated by mentally planning consequences of potential
chess moves. During the course of this evaluation even the world-class players
would discover better moves.
A key challenge for successful planning and chess skill is that the chess
players are able to represent the chess positions in working memory in a
manner that allows evaluation and flexible exploration of sequences of moves.
The skills required to represent and manipulate chess positions in long-term
memory appear to develop slowly as a function of increased chess skill
(Ericsson, Patel & Kintsch, 2000). Consequently, more skilled chess players have
been shown to be able to plan and evaluate the consequences of longer sequences
of moves and are more able to represent chess positions in the mind so they can
<LINK "eri-r11">
"eri-r5">
"eri-r4">
"eri-r17">
"eri-r24">
"eri-r27">
reason about potential moves. Furthermore, their memory for briefly presented
chess positions is vastly superior to those of less skilled players. However, this
memory superiority is limited to representative chess positions and disappears
almost completely when chess positions are randomly re-arranged.
How is it possible to improve one’s ability to plan and to select the best
action in a given game situation? To deal with this challenge chess players
typically seek to improve by studying published games between the very best
chess players in the world. They play through the games one move at the time
to see if their selected move will match the corresponding move originally
selected by the masters. If the chess master’s move differed from their own
selection, it would imply that in their planning and evaluation the less skilled
chess players must have overlooked some aspect of the position. Through more
careful and extended analysis, the aspiring chess expert is generally able to
discover the reasons for the chess master’s move. Serious chess players spend as
much as four hours every day engaged in this type of solitary study (Charness,
Krampe, & Mayr, 1996; Ericsson et al., 1993).
The key method that chess players use to improve their selection of chess
moves involves extended analysis of the consequences of moves for a chess
position. Although chess experts can rapidly retrieve appropriate actions for a
new chess position (cf. Calderwood et al., 1988 and Gobet & Simon, 1996), their
move selection can be further improved by planning, reasoning, and evaluation
(Ericsson et al., 2000). By spending more time analyzing the same chess
position players can increase the quality of their move selection for that
position. During years of chess study, aspiring chess experts keep refining their
representations of chess positions so they can access or generate the same or
similar moves faster. For example, chess masters can typically recognize an
appropriate move for a given chess position immediately, while it will take a
competent club player around 15 minutes to uncover a good move for the same
position by successive planning and evaluation. The superior ability of skilled
players to plan out consequences of move sequences is well documented. In
fact, chess masters are able to play blindfold, without a visible board showing the
current position, at a relatively high level (Karpov, 1995; Koltanowski, 1985).
Experiments show that chess masters are able to follow chess games in their head
when the experimenter reads a sequence of moves form a chess games, and are also
able to retrieve any aspect of the position when probed by the experimenter (see
Ericsson and Oliver’s studies described in Ericsson & Staszewski, 1989). Highly
skilled players can even play several simultaneous games mentally, thus main-
taining multiple chess positions in memory (Saarilouma, 1991).
<LINK "eri-r37">
Typing. Most adults are able to type, yet there are often large individual
differences in their attained proficiency. As long as the typed copy is correct the
differences between typists will only concern speed. The measurement of typing
speed is relatively straightforward. During a typing test individuals are given a
previously unseen text and are asked to type as fast as they can without making
errors for 2–3 minutes. A careful analysis of the processes of typing using high-
speed films shows that the faster typists start moving their fingers toward their
desired locations on the keyboard well before the keys are struck. The superior
typists’ advantage is linked to looking further ahead in the text beyond the word
that they are currently typing (Salthouse, 1984). By looking further ahead they
can prepare future keystrokes in advance. This finding has been confirmed by
experimental studies where expert typists have been restricted from looking
ahead. Under such constrained conditions typing speed is dramatically reduced
and approaches the speed of other less skilled typists (Salthouse, 1984). In sum,
the superior speed of expert performers appears to depend primarily on
mediating representations that allow advance preparation rather than faster
basic speed of their nervous system.
Extensive research on typing provides the best insights into how speed of
performance can be increased through deliberate practice that refines the
representations mediating anticipation. The central finding is that individuals
can systematically increase their typing speed by pushing themselves as long as
they can maintain full concentration, which is typically only 15–30 minutes per
day for untrained typists. While straining themselves to type at a faster speed
(typically around 10–20% faster than their normal speed) typists seem to strive
to anticipate better — possibly by extending their gaze ahead further.
The faster tempo also serves to uncover keystroke combinations that are
comparatively slow and poorly executed. These combinations are then trained
in special exercises and incorporated in the typing of regular text in order to
assure that any modifications can be integrated with the representations
mediating regular typing. By successively eliminating weaknesses, typists can
increase their average speed and practice at a rate that is still 10–20% faster than
the new average typing speed. The general approach of finding methods to push
performance beyond current levels of performance (even if that performance
can be maintained only for short time) offers the potential for identifying and
correcting weaker components and enhancing anticipation that will result in
improved performance.
Broader view. The theoretical framework of expert performance makes the
fundamental claim that improvement in superior reproducible performance of
adult experts doesn’t happen automatically nor magically. Performance

improvement can be linked to changes in cognitive mechanisms mediating how
the brain and nervous system control performance and in the degree of
adaptation of physiological systems of the body. The principal challenge to
attaining expert level performance is to induce stable changes that allow the
performance to be incrementally improved.
Once physiological and cognitive adaptations have been attained, then
performance of the practice activities on the same regular daily schedule will
not lead to further improvements, and the performance will remain at the same
level. Further improvement of performance requires increased challenges and
engagement in selected activities specifically designed to improve one’s current
performance — namely deliberate practice.
Once we conceive of expert performance as mediated by complex integrat-
ed systems of representations for the execution, monitoring, planning and
analysis of performance, it becomes clear that the acquisition of expert perfor-
mance requires an orderly and deliberate approach. Deliberate practice is
therefore designed to improve specific aspects of performance in a manner that
assures that attained changes can be successfully integrated into representative
performance. Hence, practice aimed at improving the integrated expert
performance cannot be executed mindlessly nor independently from the
representative context in which the expert performance will naturally occur. In
any domain of expertise more accomplished individuals, ideally professional
coaches and teachers, will play an essential role in guiding future experts to
acquire superior performance in a safe and effective manner. Aspiring expert
performers need help from colleagues, teachers, and coaches to design appro-
priate training activities that will allow them to reach a higher level of perfor-
mance. They also need help to negotiate the many constraints for sustaining
daily deliberate practice for extended periods such as respecting the essential
need for intermittent rest and daily recuperation.
Expertise in interpreting
The domain of interpreting has many characteristics in common with other

domains of professional expertise, such as computer programming, medicine
and accounting. Professional interpreters must have considerable experience
prior to becoming professionals. They must have mastered the source and target
languages and are likely to have studied languages and various aspects of
<LINK "eri-r10">
"eri-r16">
translation at the university level. Another similarity between expertise in

interpreting and expertise in other professional domains is that interpreters are
specialists, and there are a very small number of people in the world who
regularly perform the same task. For example, there is a very small number of
professional interpreters who regularly translate from one specific language,
such as Swedish, to another language, such as Hungarian. The dramatic
specialization creates problems for evaluation and measurement of expertise,
because only other professional interpreters with the same language combina-
tions are even able to judge the quality of their real-time performance of
interpreting at a given event.
Based on my search of the literature I have found only a small number of
published studies that compared professional interpreters to less-accomplished
individuals. I will, therefore, start by describing traditional approaches to
studying skilled and expert interpreters and then illustrate how the expert-
performance approach to studying expert interpreting would differ.
Traditional approaches to the study of skilled and expert interpreting

The pioneering research on simultaneous interpreting was conducted within
the theoretical framework of information theory where the act of repeating a
message (shadowing) was compared to interpreting the same message into
another language (Gerver, 1976). The early studies attempted to assess how
interpreters were able to listen and comprehend the current part of a presented
message while simultaneously vocalizing a translation of another part of that
message that had been presented earlier. The focus of this research was on how
the activity of listening and speaking could be performed within the constraints
of human memory and perception in general. Consequently individual differ-
ences in interpreting performance were mostly ignored in this research.
Consistent with the common-sense view of expertise described in the introduc-
tion, interpreting performance was assumed to be constrained by the basic
processing capacities that would allow only some individuals to become
successful interpreters. Longley, one of the pioneering investigators in this line
of research, even claimed that experience in interpreting had minimal effect on
performance: “no special training was required [for interpreting]” and that “it
all depended on an innate special skill” (see Dillinger, 1989, p. 17). If this
hypothesis were correct, one would expect that professional interpreters would
differ from the general population in terms of some basic capacities and
abilities. However, subsequent studies have failed to find and link success in
<LINK "eri-r42">
"eri-r33">
"eri-r10">
"eri-r16">
"eri-r26">
"eri-r40">
interpreting to basic, and possibly innate, abilities (see Moser-Mercer, Frauen-

felder, Casado, & Kunzli, 2000).
A more inductive approach would examine the differences in performance
between professional interpreters and of regular bilinguals to identify qualita-
tive, presumably innate, differences in ability. Dillinger (1989, 1994) completed
one of the few studies with large samples of professional interpreters. He
compared professional interpreters (N=8, an average of 8.5 years of experience
or 3830 hours of actual interpreting) with bilingual participants (N=16)
without any professional experience in interpreting. Surprisingly Dillinger
found no qualitative differences between the two groups. Expert interpreters
and bilinguals showed virtually the same pattern of performance across
conditions. The experts differed from the bilingual participants primarily in
being better in all the aspects measured. For example, experts translated more
propositions (basic units of meaning), namely 70 %, compared to 54 %
translated by the bilinguals. These findings led Dillinger to conclude that expert
interpreting depends on skills and abilities to process discourse in both languag-
es. However, Dillinger’s (1989, 1994) cross-sectional design doesn’t allow
assessment of causality. Did the professional interpreters become proficient
because of these previously acquired skills or did they acquire these skills during
their training and experience as interpreters?
Development of expert performance in interpreting. Longitudinal studies of
the development of expert performance are extremely rare, but it is often
possible to study the rapid development of mastery during intensive education
and training. Prior to the start of an intensive course for interpreters Gerver,
Longley, Long and Lambert (1984) tested several types of abilities to predict the
attained performance (course grade). Gerver et al. were reasonably successful
and found that the students’ memory for text and logical memory (depth of
understanding) predicted individual differences in consecutive interpreting
performance. In the more time-constrained simultaneous interpreting Gerver
et al. found that cloze tests, where the students had to fill in the missing word,
and generate synonyms, predicted individual differences in performance. All of
these findings are consistent with a larger body of literature on interpreting that
suggests that interpreters develop new supplementary skills that build on their
pre-existing mastery of the two languages. Hence, expert interpreting is
mediated not by fully automatic translation processes but rather by mechanisms
and mental representations that provide interpreters with tools to gain more
control over their translations (Kiraly, 1997; Seguinot, 1997; Shreve, 1997). The
increased facility with which expert interpreters perform tasks — typically
<LINK "eri-r11">
"eri-r32">
"eri-r31">
"eri-r20">
"eri-r29">
"eri-r22">
"eri-r23">
viewed as evidence of automation — can be explained by the acquisition of

refined representations in line with restructuring during second-language
learning (McLeod & McLaughlin, 1986). By refining their representations
expert interpreters are able to attend and focus on only those aspects of the
presented message that are relevant and critical to an accurate translation. These
aspects can be encoded and stored in LTWM (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995),
whereas other less pertinent aspects can be disregarded.
Introspective description of mediating mechanisms. In the domain of inter-
preting, most of the evidence on these complex mechanisms and strategies
mediating expert interpreting is based on introspective analysis by the expert
interpreters on their own cognitive processes. Much of the current evidence
therefore lacks independent verification and experimental validation and
doesn’t meet the standards of laboratory research as argued by Massaro and
Shlesinger (1997). In fact, when expert translators are instructed to “think
aloud” while working, they primarily verbalize the resulting thoughts rather
than describe any detailed strategies (House, 2000). This has led some investiga-
tors to move away from the verbalizing instructions of think aloud and towards
designing a task where two translators have to work together to produce a single
translation of the text (Kussmaul, 1995). The latter method produces a much
richer set of methods and strategies. However, the conversational method elicits
descriptive information that would not necessarily have been accessed and then
verbalized if a single translator had focused fully on the translation task. For an
excellent discussion of the differences between conversations between two
translators and other types of verbal reports, such as think aloud protocols, the
reader is referred to the chapter by Jääskeläinen (2000).
A different approach toward collecting more detailed information on the
cognitive processes in translation has been taken by Jakobsen (2002, 2003). In
addition to the translators’ think-aloud protocols he collects a detailed trace of
their typing responses when they first type in their translation and then edit and
revise it.
Alternative verbal reports methods. Through the history of psychology, there
has always been the temptation to ask participants to describe the factors
controlling their performance. If subjects could give valid descriptions of their
behavior and the detailed processes that mediate this behavior, then the time-
consuming and tedious work collecting data with experimental tasks in the
laboratory would not be necessary. However, verbal descriptions and explanations
given by experts and other subjects are often inconsistent with careful observa-
tions of their actual behavior. In fact, Herb Simon and I (Ericsson & Simon,
<LINK "eri-r19">
"eri-r35">
"eri-r11">
"eri-r47">
"eri-r1">
"eri-r44">
1980, 1984, 1993, 1998) discuss several examples of inconsistencies between

actual behavior and answers from interviews and questionnaires. Similar types
of inconsistency between verbal reports and observed behavior have been
frequently documented even when participants are engaged in experimental
tasks and asked to explain why they selected one of several possible actions (see
Nisbett and Wilson, 1977, for a classic review).
There are many types of behaviors, especially habitual behaviors, where a
behavior is emitted without any reportable thoughts that are necessary to
mediate and control it. There are, however, many types of behavior where all
participants will spontaneously report mediating thoughts. When we ask college
students to “think aloud” (see Ericsson and Simon, 1984, 1993, pp. 375–379, for
instructions) while they multiply 36*24 mentally, they all verbalize intermediate
thoughts. For example, they might say something like “four times six is twenty
four”, “carry the two”, “four times three is twelve”, “fourteen”, “one forty
four”, …, “eight, six, four, eight hundred sixty four”. Without going into the
theoretic model, Herb Simon and I (Ericsson & Simon, 1980, 1984, 1993)
proposed that participants are able to report many of the mediating thoughts
concurrently (think aloud) or recall the mediating thoughts immediately after
the completion of the task. Based on reviews of over one hundred studies we
also showed that when the appropriate verbal reporting procedures are used
then participants can generate these types of reports without changing the
structure of the underlying processes. Within the cognitive science community
there has now evolved a consensus that with appropriate verbal-report instruc-
tions participants provide valid concurrent and retrospective verbal reports on
their cognitive processes that match other evidence for the associated perfor-
mance and process-trace data (Ericsson, 2001a, Von Eckardt, 1998). The
methodology of protocol analysis provides a tool that allows researchers to
identify information that pass through expert performers’ attention while they
generate their behavior without any need to embrace any controversial theoreti-
cal assumptions. In support of this claim, protocol analysis has emerged as a
practical tool to diagnose thinking outside the cognitive tradition. For example,
researchers in behavior analysis (Austin & Delaney, 1998), designers of surveys
(Sudman, Bradburn, & Schwarz, 1996) and computer software developers
(Henderson, Smith, Podd, & Varela-Alvarez, 1995) regularly collect verbal
reports and rely on protocol analysis. There are, however, limits for the use of
concurrent think aloud to study interpreting. For example, it is impossible for
an interpreter to both think aloud and present a simultaneous oral translation
to an audience. On the other hand “think-aloud” methodology has been
<LINK "eri-r16">
"eri-r23">
"eri-r25">
"eri-r11">
successfully applied to translation where the translated information is generated

in an non-oral modality and typed into a computer (Jakobsen, 2002, in press).
Think-aloud protocols and retrospective reports emitted during translation.
The think-aloud verbalizations elicited from experts engaged in translation
appear to be similar to those observed when college students think aloud while
reading texts (Ericsson, 1988a). When instructed to think aloud while reading
well-written text, individuals mostly read portions of the text aloud. This is
reasonable when one conceives of a given text as a path laid out to help the
reader construct the author’s intended ideas. Consequently the author has
found the best words and the most natural way to express the ideas presented in
the text. The reader is thus inclined to verbalize these ideas using the same
words and thus they can express the comprehension of the presented ideas by
reading the text aloud. However, when the text is written in an unusual manner
that uses a different vocabulary and style from those of the readers, such as legal
documents and instructions, then the readers will “translate” the written text
into their own mode of expressing ideas. Similarly, when the text is difficult to
understand because of unfamiliar vocabulary or lack of necessary background
knowledge the reader begins to engage in problem-solving activities in an
attempt to assimilate the meaning of the text (Kintsch, 1988). When engaging
in these problem-solving efforts in order to integrate the presented information,
the think-aloud verbalizations will reflect the intermediate thoughts generated
to reach an understanding of the presented text (Ericsson, 1988a). I will later
discuss how one might be able to rely on these principles to gain information
about the thought processes of translators and interpreters using concurrent
and retrospective verbal reports (Ericsson & Simon, 1993).
Experimental disruptions of comprehension and translation. An alternative
methodology to study text comprehension is based on the observation that
readers can be interrupted by some attention-demanding, yet irrelevant, task
and then resume reading with minor difficulties. Reading times for the first
couple of sentences are somewhat longer because the readers need to access the
memory of the text stored in long-term memory but there are no reliable effects
on the comprehension of the text. It is possible to study the semantic represen-
tation of the text in LTWM (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995) with various cued-recall
probes to assess how the relevant information in the text has been encoded and
integrated. Although I do not know of studies of interpreting and translation
that have used this methodology, I am aware of some results that show that
long-term memory for presented text while interpreting is considerable. Gerver
(1974a) found that recall after interpreting the text was 51%, which was only
<LINK "eri-r11">
"eri-r41">
slightly lower than when individuals just listened to it (58%), but higher than
when they had to shadow the text (43%).
General comments on approaches to the study of interpreting. There are
different approaches to studying complex processes such as comprehension and
interpreting. The more traditional laboratory approaches of cognitive psycholo-
gy tend to study the basic processes such as word recognition and categoriza-
tion. However, there are compelling reasons against attempting to break apart
the complex process of comprehension and translation into independent
components. Shlesinger (2000) reviews the evidence against the decomposabili-
ty of interpreting into components, subprocesses and sub-subprocesses. For
example, she discusses why the study of contextual facilitation of accessing
meaning for isolated words may not tell us anything useful about “how it works
when combined with the many other components of the process” (Shlesinger,
2000, p. 5). She shows the importance of the complex semantic context at the
level of the discourse for generating the meaning of a word and a sentence.
Consequently, she makes a strong case that studies of interpreting should use
ecologically valid materials that have the normal variability and structure of
discourse encountered in representative situations for interpreting.
The expert-performance approach (Ericsson & Smith, 1991) was proposed
as an alternative to the traditional search for basic processes studied with
carefully designed materials and experiments. The central idea of this approach
is to identify stable phenomena of superior performance in everyday life and
then reconstruct in the laboratory the representative conditions that elicited this
performance in everyday life. This approach recognizes that some experts are
surprisingly unable to perform well on tasks outside their very narrow domain
of expertise — some of them may not even be clearly superior on slightly
modified tasks. Hence, the focus of empirical research on expertise should be
on identifying reproducibly superior performance and then developing meth-
ods to reproduce that performance under standardized conditions in the
laboratory.
An expert-performance approach to interpreting

The expert-performance approach (Ericsson & Smith, 1991) to studying
expertise in a domain, such as interpreting, proceeds in three steps. The first
step involves capturing the reliably superior performance of expert interpreters
over other less skilled individuals, such as bilinguals that have all the necessary
knowledge about languages but lack training and experience in simultaneous or
<LINK "eri-r10">
consecutive interpreting. Consequently, the key challenge is to find those

representative real-time tasks that capture the essence of interpreting and show
a clearly superior performance of the expert interpreters. It makes sense to
examine the processes that mediate this superior performance in order to
identify the mediating mechanisms, only when a robust superiority of expert
interpreters on some tasks is established. The final step then involves explaining
the origin of these mechanisms and, if they are acquired, what kinds of practice
activities led to their acquisition.
Finding a collection of representative tasks. It may seem reasonable to expect
that the closer one gets to capturing the actual conditions that professional
interpreters experience in their daily work, the larger the superiority of their
performance in comparison to inexperienced bilinguals. If that were the case
then one wonders why the differences in performance are not larger in studies,
such as Dillinger’s (1989, 1994), where the interpreting tasks were designed to
approximate many aspects of the representative conditions of interpreting.
However, a more careful analysis shows that the presented materials were texts
designed with more complex structure than an individual is likely to generate
in ad-lib speech or comment. Furthermore, the texts were presented at unusual-
ly high rates of presentation to challenge the professional interpreters.
Dillinger’s messages were presented at a fixed level of around 145 words per
minute. Interestingly (similar to what Dillinger found in his study) Gerver
(Dillinger, 1989) found this speed to lead to accuracy of translated words at
around 75%. With slower rates around 112 words per minute Gerver (Dillinger,
1989) found nearly perfect translation by the professional interpreters. It is
therefore likely that the results would have been different if the texts and speech
rates had better approximated the representative conditions of professional
interpreters. Until researchers agree on well-defined criteria for representative
task conditions that consistently elicit superior interpreting performance, it will
be difficult to proceed to study the mechanisms that mediate such superior
performance.
Based on attempts to capture expert performance in other domains there
are some heuristics that have been successfully applied to identify tasks that
elicit reproducibly superior performance. One approach focuses on individual
expert interpreters, and it studies their naturally-occurring assignments in
interpreting and then examines the conditions that are necessary for them to
exhibit clearly superior performance than less skilled interpreters. In fact,
Dillinger (1989) discusses several ways that his experimental conditions
intentionally deviated from standard practice in interpreting. The interpreting
<LINK "eri-r11">
"eri-r39">
task was decontextualized and the participants were not given a plausible
context for a naturally occurring event where the texts might have been
presented. Furthermore, the interpreters were not allowed to make any prepara-
tion for their performance or assess whether their background knowledge
would be sufficient for accepting the assignment. These deviations from normal
practice might have influenced the results, because preparation and primed
domain knowledge have very potent effects on expert performance in other
domains. Highly specialized knowledge is critical to superior performance in
many domains of expertise. For example, auditors’ ability to detect fraud
depends on their knowledge of a particular industry, such as pharmacological
companies, and thus doesn’t generalize to other types of companies (see
Ericsson and Lehmann, 1996). Similarly, scientists’ ability to test hypotheses
does not always generalize to other areas within the same academic discipline
(Schraagen, 1993). There are many instances of highly restricted domain-specific
superiority of experts’ superior performance (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996).
Another approach is motivated by the fact that many experts frequently do
not show their superiority with typical and routine situations. Many airline
pilots and medical doctors in training may be quite able to master routine cases
where there are no unusual circumstances or unexpected problems. In these
domains experts demonstrate their superiority in handling unexpected prob-
lems and rare and extreme conditions. Similarly, when chess players are
presented with positions from unfamiliar chess matches and asked to select the
best move (unlike the start of a real chess match), these players are not present-
ed the opening position, where there are many equally good moves, nor are
positions presented where the best move is obvious. Chess players are instead
presented with positions from the middle part of chess games where many
possible and acceptable moves are available and the best move is difficult to find
for the less accomplished players. Similarly, the superiority of medical experts
is seen most clearly when they have read and diagnosed charts and descriptions
of medical patients with rare and infrequent diseases or with multiple interac-
tive diseases. According to this approach to capturing expert performance one
should search for representative challenging situations that require an immedi-
ate response and where the superior actions are only elicited by the experts
(Ericsson & Smith, 1991).
This approach can be extended to the domain of interpreting by searching
for difficult, yet representative situations in interpreting that can be induced by
having individuals translate relatively short segments that may only span a
couple of minutes. It might be fruitful to interview professionals and teachers
<LINK "eri-r7">
"eri-r11">
to identify segments that they have experienced and consider to be challenging,

especially for less skilled interpreters. To study superior interpreting perfor-
mance the experts and novices would be presented with segments of messages
that had been carefully analyzed and then selected to confront the interpreters
with one or more specific representative challenges. It would be possible to
reinstate a new representative context for each task and then have the partici-
pants interpret a series of tasks with interspersed breaks, thus providing repeated
independent observations of the interpreters’ performance.
Another challenge for interpreters is to be able to sustain their interpreting
performance for a long time, especially when a single interpreter is responsible
for translating all the presented information at an event. It is likely that skilled
interpreters may develop special techniques to cope with the challenges of
maintaining an acceptable quality of translation when they are engaged for
extended periods with only limited opportunities for rest.
Finally, most individuals who are considered to be expert in a specific
domain may not be capable of demonstrating general superiority of their
performance. In the introduction I mentioned the lack of reproducibly superior
objective performance of “expert” stockbrokers, “expert” psychotherapists and
the weak superiority of wine-experts in describing unfamiliar wines. When
“experts” are not exhibiting superior performance, then it is quite legitimate to
pre-test “experts” and then select only those that are able to consistently
interpret at a superior level to bilinguals and less skilled interpreters.
In sum, the key challenge for the study of expert performance is to identify
the collection of tasks that capture the superior performance of, at least some,
experts in a repeatable and reproducible fashion. In the ideal case performance
is so superior that on virtually every trial with the selected representative tasks
the expert performers are able to exhibit a qualitatively superior performance,
such as selecting a better move for chess players, generating the correct diagno-
sis for medical experts, and typing faster than less accomplished individuals
(Ericsson, et al., 2000).
Process-tracing and experimental analysis of reproducibly superior perfor-
mance. In those domains where it has been possible to repeatedly reproduce
experts’ superiority in performance on a set of specific tasks, it is possible to
apply process-tracing and experimental methods to identify the mediating
mechanisms that are responsible for the performance advantage (Ericsson &
Simon, 1993; Ericsson & Smith, 1991). However, in the domain of interpreting
researchers have not identified such demonstrations of consistently superior
performance. Given that studies on simultaneous interpretation (Chernov,
<LINK "eri-r6">
"eri-r10">
"eri-r16">
"eri-r11">
1979; Dillinger, 1989, 1994; Gerver, 1974b) only report average performance
across all interpreters and their different responses, it is not possible to assess
individual differences among interpreters. Hence, it is quite possible that some
of the best interpreters would show a large and consistent superiority on a
selection of the translation tasks. Until investigators have searched for and
designed such representative tasks where some experts consistently produce
superior responses, it will not be possible to apply the standard set of analytic
tools, such as task analysis, protocol analysis and experimental analysis of
performance as measured by accuracy and latencies. Even then it will be
necessary to adapt some of these tools, such as think-aloud and retrospective
protocols, to study simultaneous and consecutive interpreting.
Based on my reading of the literature of expert interpreting it seems likely
that the most superior and reproducible performance in interpreting would be
observed with a small number of experts, perhaps even a single expert who may
exhibit his/her performance for a restricted set of interpreting tasks. Whereas
traditional experimental research requires relatively large samples of partici-
pants, research on expert performance has confronted the methodological
problems of how to study a single individual’s performance experimentally and
to trace the mediating cognitive processes. The most extensive experimental
investigations of exceptional performers have been completed in the domain of
memory. It is not uncommon for individuals with exceptional memory to be
able to recall 80–100 digits presented under the same task conditions where
college students can recall no more than 10–11 digits. If one were to quantify
this superiority using estimates of traditional effect sizes, the superiority of
experts over college students exceeded ten, sometimes fifty, standard deviations
(Ericsson, Chase, & Faloon, 1980). Exceptional memory performance has been
repeatedly reproduced in the laboratory. Exceptional individuals performed
experimental variants of the standard memory task while giving concurrent or
retrospective reports on their thought processes (Ericsson, 1988b). Based on a
task analysis and a protocol analysis of the verbal reports Chase and Ericsson
(1982) proposed encoding and retrieval mechanisms that appeared to be
essential for successful exceptional memory performance. These proposed
mechanisms were tested by comparing the memory performance under control
conditions to performance under altered experimental conditions. Especially
when there are stable differences in strategies and representations between
experts, it is important to be able to study the mechanisms of each expert and
design tailor-made experiments to validate specific characteristics of the
proposed mechanisms. Most importantly, it was possible to design experimental
<LINK "eri-r11">
"eri-r6">
"eri-r10">
"eri-r16">
"eri-r33">
conditions that essentially disrupted the acquired skilled mechanisms underly-

ing the exceptional memory performance (Chase & Ericsson, 1982; Ericsson,
1988b; Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). Performance differences of comparable
magnitude have been demonstrated for expert music performers, chess masters
and elite athletes. In these cases, the reproducible performance of the experts is
completely outside the normal range of performance of novices, and sometimes
even beyond the achievements of less skilled performers (Ericsson & Lehmann,
1996; Ericsson et al., 2000).
The research on exceptional memory for digits has another interesting
connection to superior interpreting. The mechanisms uncovered to mediate
exceptional memory for digits were later generalized to LTWM (Ericsson &
Kintsch, 1995) that could explain experts’ expanded working memory and
skilled readers’ working memory during the comprehension of text. Ericsson
and Kintsch (1995) reviewed the extensive evidence on how encoding skills and
knowledge related to the text’s theme facilitate understanding and memory of
the information in the text. The theoretical framework of LTWM should be
particularly well suited to explicate how better comprehension and encoding of
information in the source language might improve the generation and produc-
tion of interpretations (Dillinger, 1989, 1994; Gerver et al., 1984).
Examination of how the mechanisms mediating the experts’ superior perfor-
mance are acquired. Until it is possible to specify the mechanisms mediating the
experts’ stable performance advantage, it may be premature to examine how
these mechanisms have been acquired. On the other hand, it is unquestionable
that students in schools of interpreting improve their performance as function
of their training and interpreting experience. For example, Moser-Mercer
(2000) reports evidence on the development of interpreting performance and
documents the types of mistakes that are gradually eliminated during training.
However, the analysis of experts’ superior performance in other domains, such
as chess, music and sports (Ericsson, 1998, 2002), has repeatedly shown that the
mechanisms mediating the fairly rapid attainment of an acceptable average level
of performance may rely on different types of processes than those that have to
be acquired to attain elite levels.
If we are primarily interested in the development of elite interpreting
performance, it may be necessary to seek out those individuals that have
attained outstanding reproducible level of interpreting performance. Based on the
evidence reviewed in the first part of this paper, it is likely that elite interpreters
have studied and practiced interpreting for 10–20 years, which makes longitudi-
nal studies very difficult. Consequently, the most time-effective approach to
<LINK "eri-r16">
"eri-r11">
"eri-r28">
gain initial information on how individuals attained their elite performance

involves interviews where the interpreters report salient and reliable informa-
tion about their developmental history. The development of the elite inter-
preters’ performance can then be compared to that of less proficient interpret-
ers. From this type of interview, combined with diaries of the activities of the
expert performers, our group (Ericsson et al., 1993) was able to identify the type
of training activities that are most closely related to the attainment of the
highest levels in music performance, i.e. deliberate practice. Although the
detailed characteristics of deliberate practice differ as a function of the demands
on the expert performance in each domain of expertise, the best individuals
have been found to engage in a greater quantity and quality of deliberate
practice in a wide range of domains (Ericsson, 1996, 1998, 2001b; Krampe &
Ericsson, 1996).
Based on the earlier review of characteristics of expert interpreting one can
in a speculative vein distinguish two aspects that might mediate superior
performance. The first aspect concerns the comprehension of the original
message. The quality of the encoding of the information to be interpreted will
impose obvious limits on the quality of the generated interpretation. For
example, Gerver et al. (1984) found that scores on ability tests related to
comprehension and quality of encoding in the source language were related to
performance on consecutive interpretation.
How could someone improve comprehension and the original encoding in
LTWM of the source message? Deliberate-practice activities that might improve
such initial encoding would involve processes similar to those identified for
chess playing and sports, where the individuals receive feedback on their own
mistakes or sub-optimal selections of their actions and moves. The performers
then go back to the target situation, such as the chess position or videotaped
game, and then examine how they could have made a better selection of actions
in the future. Ideally, the time interval between making the mistake and the
retrospective analysis should be short to maximize memory for the individuals’
own thoughts that mediated the sub-optimal behavior. Similar to deliberate
practice in chess where players try to predict the moves made by chess masters
in published games, it might be very beneficial for interpreting students to listen
to the messages interpreted by experts. In the case of consecutive interpretation,
the students could generate their own interpretation of the message and then listen
and compare their interpretation to that of the expert. If the two interpretations
matched there would be no need for further action except to continue to the
next part of the message. However, in the case of a mismatch, the interpreters
<LINK "eri-r30">
"eri-r16">
"eri-r41">
would need to analyze the difference and how they would be able to generate a
better encoding in the future. It would be even more effective and desirable to
have a master teacher observe the process and help the interpreter to identify
the important aspects.
The second aspect concerns the challenges of simultaneous interpretation.
Gerver et al. (1984) found that this form of interpretation performance was
related to the scores on ability tests that required inferring missing words in
texts and generating synonyms. The real-time constraint of simultaneous
interpreting forces interpreters to be selective and to extract the main ideas
concurrently. It is an important skill to be able to omit redundant and less
important information in messages (Shlesinger, 2000). The challenges of these
tasks resemble those of musicians who are forced to sight-read music, that is to
play without prior preparation, when they accompany a singer. Lehmann and
Ericsson (1993, 1996) found that all pianists were able to perform the sight-
reading task but no pianist was able to play all the notes. The challenge was to
preserve the core melody and leave out the less important notes. They also
found that the best accompanists were able to infer the structure of the music.
For example, in an experiment they were able to continue playing the music
and more successfully predict sections of notes in the score that had been
blanked out for selected short segments. Most importantly, Andreas Lehmann
and I (Lehmann & Ericsson, 1993, 1996) found that the best sight-readers were
those pianists who reported having spent the most number of hours of sight-
reading during their musical career. The same musicians had also engaged the
most time in preparation and specific practice designed to deal with specific
challenges of accompanying, which are activities more closely related to
deliberate practice in other domains. It would be reasonable to predict a similar
pattern for the best simultaneous interpreters.
Concluding remarks
In this paper I have presented how the mechanisms mediating reproducibly

superior performance of experts differ from that of less accomplished individu-
als in a given domain of expertise. The experts’ superior performance and its
complex mechanisms have been found to be the result of gradual improve-
ments through deliberate practice that extends for years and thousands of hours
of practice. In those cases where expert performers were introduced to the
domain as children it appears that virtually all the essential aspects of elite
performance have been acquired through training, with the exception of height
and body size.
In this paper I have drawn parallels between findings on expert perfor-
mance in many different domains and actual and potential findings on expert
interpreting. There are, however, some important differences between inter-
preting and the more traditional domains of expertise. In interpreting, most
students of interpreting are introduced to training in interpreting in the late
teens and early twenties, whereas the introduction to training in traditional
domains of expertise, such as music, ballet, chess and sports, occurs around five
to ten years of age. At the point of introduction to formal training in interpret-
ing most individuals have already acquired their language skills in the relevant
languages. The challenge for teachers thus becomes how to modify and adapt
these skills to meet the demands of consecutive and simultaneous interpreting.
Once we recognize that the interpreting performance will depend on the level
and structure of pre-existing skills in encoding and producing language
messages, it raises the possible role of individual differences in acquired skills.
It is possible that some of the aspects of these skills cannot easily be extensively
modified and re-organized and thus makes it difficult for some individuals to
attain a high level of interpreting performance. It is likely that as our under-
standing of the mechanisms mediating expert interpreting improves and instru-
ments to assess those mechanisms during the training of interpreters are devel-
oped, education and training can be made more individualized and effective.
In this paper I have argued that our understanding of expert interpreting
will improve as we attempt to capture the reproducibly superior performance
of expert interpreters. Once captured, we should be able to identify the mecha-
nisms that mediate this performance and determine how these mechanisms can
be acquired through training. At the same time, I believe that the study of
interpreting will provide insights that will benefit the understanding of mecha-
nisms mediating expert performance more generally. The domain of interpret-
ing offers a unique window on real-time comprehension and will contribute
significant insights into the acquisition and refinement of meaning representa-
tions to allow translation into a completely different language. Interpreting
appears to provide a sufficiently constrained task to allow investigators in Cogni-
tive Science to study one of the most elusive phenomena in skilled activities,
namely comprehension and production of verbal messages, at the level of individ-
ual performers. Only future research will tell whether the application of the expert-
performance approach to interpreting will advance our understanding of
language comprehension and production, translation, and interpreting.
<DEST "eri-r11">
"eri-n*">
"eri-r1">
"eri-r2">
"eri-r3">
"eri-r4">
"eri-r5">
"eri-r6">
"eri-r7">
"eri-r8">
"eri-r9">
"eri-r10">
Note
* This article was prepared in part while the author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for the financial support provided by the John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Grant #32005–0. This research was also
supported by the FSCW/Conradi Endowment Fund of Florida State University Foundation.
The author wants to thank Len Hill, Arnt Jakobsen, Carla Urena, and Yusra Visser for their
valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
References
Austin, J., & Delaney, P. F. (1998). Protocol analysis as a tool for behavior analysis. Analysis
of Verbal Behavior, 15, 41–56.
Bloom, B. S. (1985). Generalizations about talent development. In B. S. Bloom (Ed.),
Developing talent in young people (pp. 507–549). New York: Ballantine Books.
Boucher, J. L., & Mutimer, T. P. (1994). The relative age phenomenon in sport: A replication
and extention with ice-hockey players. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 65,
377–381.
Calderwood, R., Klein, G. A., & Crandall, B.W. (1988). Time pressure, skill and move quality
in chess. American Journal of Psychology, 101, 481–493.
Charness, N., Krampe, R. Th., & Mayr, U. (1996). The role of practice and coaching in
entrepreneurial skill domains: An international comparison of life-span chess skill
acquisition. In K. A. Ericsson (Ed.), The road to excellence: The acquisition of expert
performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games (pp. 51–80). Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Chase, W. G., & Ericsson, K. A. (1982). Skill and working memory. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The
psychology of learning and motivation, Vol. 16 (pp. 1–58). New York: Academic Press.
Chernov, G. V. (1979). Semantic aspects of psycholinguistic research in simultaneous
interpretation. Language and Speech, 22, 277–295.
Dawes, R. M. (1994). House of cards: Psychology and psychotherapy built on myth. New York:
Free Press.
de Groot, A. (1978). Thought and choice in chess. The Hague: Mouton (Original work
published 1946).
Dillinger , M. (1989). Component processes of simultaneous interpreting. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation. Department of Educational Psychology, McGill University,
Montreal, Canada.
Dillinger, M. (1994). Comprehension during interpreting: What do interpreters know that
bilinguals don’t? In S. Lambert and B. Moser-Mercer (Eds.). Bridging the gap: Empirical
research in simultaneous interpretation (pp. 155–189). Amsterdam, The Netherlands:
John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Ericsson, K. A. (1988a). Concurrent verbal reports on reading and text comprehension. Text,
8(4), 295–325.
Ericsson, K. A. (1988b). Analysis of memory performance in terms of memory skill. In R. J.

Sternberg (Ed.), Advances in the psychology of human intelligence, Vol. 4 (pp. 137–179).
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ericsson, K. A. (1990). Peak performance and age: An examination of peak performance in
sports. P. B. Baltes and M. M. Baltes (Eds.), Successful aging: Perspectives from the
behavioral sciences (pp. 164–195). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ericsson, K. A. (1996). The acquisition of expert performance: An introduction to some of
the issues. In K. A. Ericsson (Ed.), The road to excellence: The acquisition of expert
performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games (pp.1–50). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ericsson, K. A. (1998). The scientific study of expert levels of performance: General implica-
tions for optimal learning and creativity. High Ability Studies, 9, 75–100.
Ericsson, K. A. (1998). Basic capacities can be modified or circumvented by deliberate
practice: A rejection of talent accounts of expert performance. A commentary on M.J.A.
Howe, J. W Davidson, and J. A. Sloboda “Innate Talents: Reality or Myth?” Behavioral
and Brain Sciences, 21, 413–414.
Ericsson, K. A. (2001a). Protocol analysis in psychology. In N. Smelser and P. Baltes (Eds.),
International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (pp. 12256–12262).
Oxford, UK: Elsevier.
Ericsson, K. A. (2001b). The path to expert golf performance: Insights from the masters on
how to improve performance by deliberate practice. In P. R. Thomas (Ed.), Optimising
performance in golf (pp. 1–57). Brisbane, Australia: Australian Academic Press.
Ericsson, K. A. (2002). Attaining excellence through deliberate practice: Insights from the
study of expert performance. In M. Ferrari (Ed.), The pursuit of excellence in education
(pp. 21–55). Hillsdale, N. J.: Erlbaum.
Ericsson, K. A. (2003a). The development of elite performance and deliberate practice: An
update from the perspective of the expert-performance approach. In J. Starkes and K.A.
Ericsson (Eds.), Expert performance in sport: Recent advances in research on sport expertise
(pp. 491). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
Ericsson, K. A. (2003b). How the expert-performance approach differs from traditional
approaches to expertise in sports: In search of a shared theoretical framework for
studying expert performance. In J. Starkes and K.A. Ericsson (Eds.), Expert performance
in sport: Recent advances in research on sport expertise (PP. 371–401). Champaign, IL:
Human Kinetics.
Ericsson, K. A. (in press). The search for general abilities and basic capacities: Theoretical
implications from the modifiability and complexity of mechanisms mediating expert
performance. In R. J. Sternberg and E.L. Grigorenko (Eds.), Perspectives on the psycholo-
gy of abilities, competencies, and expertise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ericsson, K. A., & Charness, N. (1994). Expert performance: Its structure and acquisition.
American Psychologist, 49(8), 725–747.
Ericsson, K. A., & Charness, N. (1995). Abilities: Evidence for talent or characteristics
acquired through engagement in relevant activities. American Psychologist, 50(9).
803–804.
Ericsson, K. A., Chase, W., & Faloon, S. (1980). Acquisition of a memory skill. Science, 208,
1181–1182.
<DEST "eri-r17">
"eri-r12">
"eri-r13">
"eri-r14">
"eri-r15">
"eri-r16">
Ericsson, K. A., & Kintsch, W. (1995). Long-term working memory. Psychological Review,
102, 211–245.
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. Th., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in
the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100, 363–406.
Ericsson, K. A., & Lehmann, A. C. (1996). Expert and exceptional performance: Evidence on
maximal adaptations on task constraints. Annual Review of Psychology, 47, 273–305.
Ericsson, K. A., Patel, V. L., & Kintsch, W. (2000). How experts’ adaptations to representative
task demands account for the expertise effect in memory recall: Comment on Vicente
and Wang (1998). Psychological Review, 107, 578–592.
Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1980). Verbal reports as data. Psychological Review, 87,
215–251.
Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1984). Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data. Cambridge,
MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1993). Protocol analysis; Verbal reports as data (revised
edition). Cambridge, MA: Bradford books/MIT Press.
Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1998). How to study thinking in everyday life: Contrasting
think-aloud protocols with descriptions and explanations of thinking. Mind, Culture, &
Activity, 5(3), 178–186.
Ericsson, K. A., & Smith, J. (1991). Prospects and limits in the empirical study of expertise:
An introduction. In K. A. Ericsson and J. Smith (Eds.), Toward a general theory of
expertise: Prospects and limits (pp. 1–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ericsson, K. A., & Staszewski, J. (1989). Skilled memory and expertise: Mechanisms of
exceptional performance. In D. Klahr and K. Kotovsky (Eds.), Complex information
processing: The impact of Herbert A. Simon (pp. 235–267). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fitts, P., & Posner, M. I. (1967). Human performance. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Galton, F., Sir (1869/1979). Hereditary genius: an inquiry into its laws and consequences
(Originally published in 1869). London: Julian Friedman Publishers.
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic
Books.
Gardner, H. (1993). Multiple intelligences: The theory in practice. New York: Basic Books.
Gawel, R. (1997). The use of language by trained an untrained experienced wine tasters.
Journal of Sensory Studies, 12, 267–284.
Gerver, D. (1974a). Simultaneous listening and speaking and retention of prose. Quarterly
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 26, 337–341.
Gerver, D. (1974b). The effects of noise on the performance of simultaneous interpreters:
Accuracy of performance. Acta Psychologica, 38, 159–167.
Gerver, D. (1976). Empirical studies of simultaneous interpretation: A review and a model.
In R. W. Brislin (Ed.), Translation: Applications and research (pp. 165–207). New York:
Gardner Press.
Gerver, D. Longley, P., Long, J., & Lambert, S. (1984). Selecting trainee conference interpret-
ers: A preliminary study. Journal of Occupational Psychology, 57, 17–31.
Gobet, F., & Simon, H. A. (1996). The roles of recognition processes and look-ahead search
in time-constrained expert problem solving: Evidence from grand-master-level chess.
Psychological Science, 7, 52–55.
<DEST "eri-r31">
"eri-r18">
"eri-r19">
"eri-r20">
"eri-r21">
"eri-r22">
"eri-r23">
"eri-r24">
"eri-r25">
"eri-r26">
"eri-r27">
"eri-r28">
"eri-r29">
"eri-r30">
Helsen, W. F., Starkes, J. L., & Hodges, N. J. (1998). Team sports and the theory of deliberate
practice. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 20, 12–34.
Helsen, W. F., Starkes, J. L., & van Winckel, J. (2000). Effect of a change in selection year on
success in male soccer players. American Journal of Human Biology, 12, 729–735.
Henderson, R. D., Smith, M. C., Podd, J., & Varela-Alvarez, H. (1995). A comparison of the
four prominent user-based methods for evaluating the usability of computer software.
Ergonomics 39, 2030–2044.
House, J. (2000). Consciousness and the strategic use of aids in translation. In S. Tirkkonen
and R. Jääskeläinen (Eds.). Tapping and mapping the processes of translation and
interpreting: Outlooks on empirical research (pp.149–162). Amsterdam, The Netherlands:
John Benjamins Publishing company.
Howe, M. J. A., Davidson, J. W., & Sloboda, J. A. (1998). Innate talents: Reality or myth?
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 399–442.
Jääskeläinen, R. (2000). Focus on methodology in think-aloud studies on translating. In S.
Tirkkonen-Condit and R. Jääskeläinen (Eds.). Tapping and mapping the processes of
translation and interpreting: Outlooks on empirical research (pp.71–82). Amsterdam, The
Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing company.
Jakobsen, A. L. (2002). Translation drafting by professional translators and by translation
students. In G. Hansen (Ed.), Empirical translation studies: Process and product (pp.
191–204) (Copenhagen Studies in Language, vol. 27). Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.
Jakobsen, A. L. (in press). Effect of think aloud on translation speed, revision, and segmenta-
tion. In F. Alves (Ed.), Triangulating translation. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
Karpov, A. (1995). Grandmaster musings. Chess Life, November, pp. 32–33.
Kintsch, W. (1988). The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A construction-
integration model. Psychological Review, 95, 163–182.
Kiraly, D. C. (1997). Think-aloud protocols and the construction of a professional translator
self-concept. In J. H. Danks, G. M. Shreve, S. B. Fountain, and M. K. McBeath (Eds.).
Cognitive processes in translation and interpreting (pp.137–160). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Koltanowski, G. (1985). In the dark. Coraopolis, PA: Chess Enterprises.
Krampe, R. Th., & Ericsson, K. A. (1996). Maintaining excellence: Deliberate practice and
elite performance in young and older pianists. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General, 125, 331–359.
Kussmaul, P. (1995). Training the translator. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins
Publishing Company.
Lehmann, A. C., & Ericsson, K. A. (1993). Sight-reading ability of expert pianists in the
context of piano accompanying. Psychomusicology, 12(2), 182–195.
Lehmann, A. C., & Ericsson, K. A. (1996). Music performance without preparation: Structure
and acquisition of expert sight-reading. Psychomusicology, 15, 1–29.
Lehmann, A. C., & Ericsson K. A. (1998). The historical development of domains of exper-
tise: Performance standards and innovations in music. In A. Steptoe (Ed.), Genius and
the mind (pp. 67–94). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Massaro, D. W., & Shlesinger, M. (1997). Information processing and a computational
approach to the study of simultaneous interpretation. Interpreting, 2, 13–53.
<DEST "eri-r47">
"eri-r32">
"eri-r33">
"eri-r34">
"eri-r35">
"eri-r36">
"eri-r37">
"eri-r38">
"eri-r39">
"eri-r40">
"eri-r41">
"eri-r42">
"eri-r43">
"eri-r44">
"eri-r45">
"eri-r46">
McLeod, B., & McLaughlin, B. (1986). Restructuring or automaticity? Reading in a second

language. Language Learning, 36, 109–123.
Moser-Mercer, B. (2000). The rocky road to expertise in interpreting: Eliciting knowledge
from learners. In M. Kadric, K. Kaindl and F. Pochhacker (Eds.). Translations-
wissenschaft (pp. 339–352). Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg Verlag.
Moser-Mercer, B., Frauenfelder, U. H., Casado, B., & Künzli, A. (2000). Searching to define
expertise in interpreting. In K. Hyltenstam and B. Englund-Dimitrova (Eds.), Language
processing and interpreting (pp. 1–21). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins
Publishing Co.
Musch J., & Hay, R. (1999). The relative age effect in soccer: Cross-cultural evidence for a
systematic discrimination against children born late in the competition year. Sociology
of Sport Journal, 16, 54–64.
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on
mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231–259.
Saariluoma, P. (1991). Aspects of skilled imagery in blindfold chess. Acta Psychologica, 77,
65–89.
Salthouse, T. A. (1984). Effects of age and skill in typing. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General, 113, 345–371.
Schneider, W. (1993). Acquiring expertise: Determinants of exceptional performance. In
K. A. Heller, J. Mönks and H. Passow (eds.), International handbook of research and
development of giftedness and talent (pp. 311–324). Oxford, U. K.: Pergamon Press.
Schraagen, J. M. (1993). How experts solve a novel problem in experimental design.
Cognitive Science, 17, 285–309.
Seguinot, C. (1997). Accounting for variability in translation. In J. H. Danks, G. M. Shreve,
S. B. Fountain, and M. K. McBeath (Eds.). Cognitive processes in translation and interpret-
ing (pp. 104–119). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Shlesinger, M. (2000). Interpreting as a cognitive process: How can we know what really
happens? In S. Tirkkonen-Condit and R. Jääskeläinen (Eds.). Tapping and mapping the
processes of translation and interpreting: Outlooks on empirical research (pp. 3–15).
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing company.
Shreve, G. M. (1997). Cognition and the evolution of translation competence. In J.H. Danks,
G. M. Shreve, S. B. Fountain, and M.K. McBeath (Eds.). Cognitive processes in translation
and interpreting (pp. 120–136). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Simon, H. A., & Chase, W. G. (1973). Skill in chess. American Scientist, 61, 394–403.
Sudman, S., Bradburn, N. M., & Schwarz, N. (Eds.) (1996). Thinking about answers: The
application of cognitive processes to survey methodology. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Sternberg, R. J. (1996). The costs of expertise. In K. A. Ericsson (Ed.), The road to excellence:
The acquisition of expert performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games (pp.
347–354). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Valentin, D., Pichon, M., de Boishebert, & Abdi, H. (2000). What’s in a wine name? When
and why do wine experts perform better than novices? Abstracts of the Psychonomic
Society, 5, 36.
Von Eckardt, B. (1998). Psychology of introspection. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge encyclope-
dia of philosophy (pp. 842–846). London, UK: Routledge.
</TARGET "eri">
About the author

K. Anders Ericsson is Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State
University. In 1976 he received his Ph. D. in Psychology from University of Stockholm,
Sweden. His research with Herbert Simon at Carnegie-Mellon University on verbal reports
of thinking is summarized in a book “Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data”
(1984/1993). Currently he studies the cognitive structure of expert performance in domains such
as music, chess and sports, and how expert performers acquire their superior performance by
extended deliberate practice. He is the co-editor of “Toward a General Theory of Expertise”
(1991), “The Road to Excellence” (1996), and “Expert Performance in Sports” (2003).
ericsson@darwin.psy.fsu.edu

Ericsson 2000

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ericsson 2000

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

<LINK "eri-r11">

This paper describes how the expert-performance perspective diﬀers from

Experience is necessary for individuals to improve their performance in any

190 K. Anders Ericsson

through experience and training, namely, their basic endowment, such as

Recent criticisms of the common-sense view

During the last couple of decades several theoretical developments have

Expertise in interpreting 191

192 K. Anders Ericsson

Expertise in interpreting 193

The scientiﬁc study of expert performance and its acquisition

194 K. Anders Ericsson

Smith, 1991, for an extended discussion)? Many types of superior performance

The acquisition of superior reproducible (expert) performance

Expertise in interpreting 195

196 K. Anders Ericsson

For an overview of the essential characteristics of deliberate practice its mediating

The complex mechanisms mediating expert performance and

Expertise in interpreting 197

8000 Least Accomplished Experts

improvements and amount of accumulated experience will not be related to

Expertise in interpreting 199

200 K. Anders Ericsson

Expertise in interpreting 201

adult experts doesn’t happen automatically nor magically. Performance

The domain of interpreting has many characteristics in common with other

Expertise in interpreting 203

translation at the university level. Another similarity between expertise in

Traditional approaches to the study of skilled and expert interpreting

204 K. Anders Ericsson

interpreting to basic, and possibly innate, abilities (see Moser-Mercer, Frauen-

Expertise in interpreting 205

viewed as evidence of automation — can be explained by the acquisition of

206 K. Anders Ericsson

1980, 1984, 1993, 1998) discuss several examples of inconsistencies between

Expertise in interpreting 207

successfully applied to translation where the translated information is generated

208 K. Anders Ericsson

An expert-performance approach to interpreting

Expertise in interpreting 209

consecutive interpreting. Consequently, the key challenge is to ﬁnd those

210 K. Anders Ericsson

Expertise in interpreting 211

to identify segments that they have experienced and consider to be challenging,

212 K. Anders Ericsson

Expertise in interpreting 213

conditions that essentially disrupted the acquired skilled mechanisms underly-

214 K. Anders Ericsson

gain initial information on how individuals attained their elite performance

Expertise in interpreting 215

In this paper I have presented how the mechanisms mediating reproducibly

Expertise in interpreting 217

Ericsson, K. A. (1988b). Analysis of memory performance in terms of memory skill. In R. J.

Expertise in interpreting 219

220 K. Anders Ericsson

Expertise in interpreting 221

McLeod, B., & McLaughlin, B. (1986). Restructuring or automaticity? Reading in a second

222 K. Anders Ericsson

About the author

You might also like