Abstract

This interdisciplinary study of novice, American–English speakers found two major discrepancies between their conceptualizations of external human anatomy, and the expert opinion of the scientific and medical community. In contrast to the experts, (1) more than 90% of the novices exhibit polysemy when identifying human limbs and (2) about 50% exhibit partonomic disagreement, about whether ‘thumbs’ are ‘fingers’, and ears are ‘parts of’ the face. Both verbal and visual test modalities were adopted in (2). No significant differences were found by modality in either case. Overall, the results about this cognitive domain support the frequent finding that, when compared to experts, novices tend to under-differentiate, making fewer specific distinctions, and use different taxonomic structures. A novel linguistic paradigm for explaining the specific findings is presented, as is their practical significance for health communications in general.