title: The role of verbal ability in the processing of complex verbal information.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: University of Georgia.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Martin
authors.forename: O
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Ewert
authors.forename: P J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Schwanenflugel
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time; D014706:Verbal Learning