Two faces of verbal ability

Although psychologists often think and act as though there were only one global domain of verbal ability, there are actually two—verbal comprehension and verbal fluency. For reasons that are not entirely clear, verbal comprehension has received, by far, the most attention in both the psychometric and information-processing literatures. Both are important, pervasive abilities. For example, whereas reading draws primarily on verbal comprehension ability, writing draws primarily on verbal fluency ability; similarly, whereas listening primarily requires verbal comprehension, speaking depends more heavily on verbal fluency. This article seeks to redress some of the imbalance in the literature on the study of these two broad domains of verbal ability. The article is divided into four main parts. The first parts set the stage by placing the study of verbal abilities in a historical context within the field of psychology. The second part describes some alternative approaches to the study of verbal comprehension, summarizing what we have learned from these approaches. The third part reviews some of the few studies that have examined verbal fluency and then describes our own new information-processing approach to the study of this ability. The fourth part explores the relations between the two faces of verbal ability—comprehension and fluency.     

Individual differences in cognition: Relationship between verbal ability and memory for order

The crucial role of order information in language has led to the suggestion that psychometrically measured verbal ability may be related to memory for order. The literature pertaining to this hypothesis is briefly reviewed and various methodological difficulties discussed. The results of three experiments indicated that (a) order and item information may be retained separately; (b) verbal ability is related to the short-term recall of order; (c) verbal ability is unrelated to memory for order when testing involves recognition rather than recall; and (d) the relationship between verbal ability and memory for order is most pronounced when the originally presented order must be transformed at output (as in the “digits backward” task). An output process in which material is decoded and held in an output buffer until decoding is complete is viewed as the most likely locus of the verbal ability-memory for order relationship.     

A factor analysis of verbal ability

The Psychological Record -     

Aspects of verbal processing in relation to perceptual disembedding ability

In this study an attempt was made to extend the notion of disembedding from the perceptual to the verbal semantic domain. Fifty-two undergraduates were presented with the Group Embedded Figure Test (GEFT) and with seven verbal tasks. A Factor analysis made on test scores, as well as other factors, evidenced a factor that linked to gether the GEFT and one of the verbal tasks (Word groups). It is argued that both tasks require the restructuring of an organized context according to new given rules, and that disembedding is a mental operation which applies to both verbal and perceptual domains.     

The role of verbal ability in the processing of complex verbal information

Summary This study investigated the relation between psychometric mental-ability test scores and several reaction-time measures; a simple-reaction task, a choice-reaction task, the Posner and Mitchell (1967) letter-identification task, and a variation of the sentence-verification task. Scores on the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Verbal Subtest of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SATV) were obtained. The less complex information-processing tasks replicate earlier studies in which general intelligence was only marginally related to reaction-time measures. The sentence-verification task systematically varied task complexity. Several direct and derived measures from the task were significantly correlated with psychometric mentalability measures. However, even though a number of precautions were taken to ensure that the sentence-verification task assessed purely verbal-processing efficiency, there was little evidence for an important task-specific relation between verification measures and verbal ability. Moreover, despite its relative verbal complexity, sentence verification did not reflect a greater relationship to verbal ability than other tasks did. Overall, the information-processing efficiency measures used in this study suggested a fairly general, rather than a task-specific, relationship to intellectual ability.The research presented in this paper was conducted while the first author was affiliated with the University of Georgia, U. S. A.     

Aspects of self-concept and their relationship to language performance and verbal reasoning ability

It has been claimed that self-concept is multidimensional, with dimensions such as mathematical self-concept and self-concept in language. The present study investigated the relationship of academic self-concept in language with performance on school-related language tasks and verbal reasoning ability. A total of 512 students in grades 7, 9, and 11 rated four aspects of their academic self-concept in language: self-perception, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and others' perception of their abilities. Verbal reasoning ability and performance on language tasks were assessed. Path analysis showed that performance on language tasks was influenced strongly by verbal reasoning abilities. Self-esteem and others' perception of one's abilities were affected directly by language performance. No direct relationship was found between academic self-concept in language and verbal reasoning ability. The results suggest that adolescents do not construe their academic self-concept according to their abilities but according to their performance in school and others' response to it.     

Patterns of intellectual ability in children with verbal deficits

Patterns of intellectual ability were examined in 81 children with verbal deficits identified by a Low Verbal/High Performance WISC profile. The results of verbal and nonverbal tests of intellectual functioning were factor-analyzed, and three groups of children were defined based on patterns of factor scores. Group 1 consisted of children with a Specific Language Disability (SLD) but good Abstract Reasoning ability, while Group 2 included SLD children with good Sequencing-Memory skills. Group 3 children displayed a General Language Disability (GLD) with deficits in both abstract reasoning and sequencing memory. The intellectual patterns were related to cognitive interpretations and found to have educational implications, with Group 1 children reading adequately, Group 2 children showing somewhat poorer reading skills, and Group 3 children reading very poorly. These findings emphasize the importance of identifying subgroups of children with verbal deficits and demonstrate the feasibility of extracting relatively specific cognitive information from global measures of intelligence. The results question the appropriateness of applying traditional assumptions regarding cognitive organization derived from studies of normal children to atypical groups of children.     

Contributions of processing ability and knowledge to verbal memory tasks across the adult life-span

This study investigated the relationships of processing capacity and knowledge to memory measures that varied in retrieval difficulty and reliance on verbal knowledge in an adult life-span sample (N = 341). It was hypothesized that processing ability (speed and working memory) would have the strongest relationship to tasks requiring active retrieval and that knowledge (vocabulary ability) would be related to verbal fluency and cued recall, as participants relied upon verbal knowledge to retrieve category items (fluency) or develop associations (cued recall). Measurement and structural equation models were developed for the entire sample and separately for younger (aged 20-54 years, n = 168) and older (aged 55-92 years, n = 173) subgroups. In accordance with the hypotheses, processing ability was found to be most highly related to free recall, with additional significant relationships to cued recall, verbal fluency, and recognition. Knowledge was found to be significantly related only to verbal fluency and to cued recall. Moreover, knowledge was more important for older than for younger adults in mediating variance in cued recall, suggesting that older adults may use age-related increases in knowledge to partially compensate for processing declines when environmental support is available in memory tasks.     

Morningness-eveningness correlates with verbal ability in women but not men

Individuals differ along a continuum of preference for diurnal activity level, known as Morningness-Eveningness. Some evidence suggests that an Eveningness orientation (i.e., preference for later rise and bed times) is weakly associated with higher cognitive ability, but no studies have examined this relationship using clinically accepted, psychometrically valid measures of cognitive ability. The present study examined the correlation between Morningness-Eveningness with scores on the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI) of 54 healthy volunteers. Lower Morningness (i.e., Greater Eveningness) orientation was correlated (r = -.23) with higher Verbal IQ for the entire sample. When the data were examined separately by sex, the correlation between Morningness-Eveningness and Verbal IQ was significant for women (r = -.44) but not for men (r = -.09).