professional accountants in the United States and in German-speaking countries have similar meaning. To our knowledge, this is the first study of uncertainty expressions to use professional accountants in more than one country.

Hypotheses based on cultural relativism and translation effects are tested using data gathered through a field experiment. The answer to the research question is important to the viability of using a single set of accounting standards worldwide. The selection of the United States and Germany as Countries to study is relevant because these two countries are important for the process of worldwide harmonization. The study is also timely from a U.S. perspective as the Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC) debates whether foreign registrants should be allowed to use IAS in preparing financial statements without reconciliation to U.S. GAAP.

The remainder of this paper is organized into six sections. The first section provides a review of related studies in the psychology and accounting literatures, and includes a discussion of culture and linguistic relativism. The second section describes the uncertainty expressions examined in the study. The third section presents the specific research questions and hypotheses tested. The fourth section describes the research methodology, and the fifth section presents the analysıs and results. The final section provides a summary and offers conclusions.

RELATED LITERATURE Psychology Research

A considerable amount of research has been conducted and reported in the psychology literature investigating the quantitative meanings of verbal probability expressions(e.g., Sımpson, 1963; Lichtenstein and Newman, 1967; Beyth-Marom, 1982; Budescu and Wallsten,

1985; Reagan, Mosteller, and Youtz, 1989). More than 280 different probability expressions