THE ROLE OF VERBAL-ABILITY IN THE PROCESSING OF COMPLEX VERBAL INFORMATION

This study investigated the relation between psychometric mental-abili ty test scores and several reaction-time measures; a simple-reaction t ask, a choice-reaction task, the Posner and Mitchell (1967) letter-ide ntification task, and a variation of the sentence-verification task. S cores on the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Verbal Subtes t of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SATV) were obtained. The less compl ex information-processing tasks replicate earlier studies in which gen eral intelligence was only marginally related to reaction-time measure s. The sentence-verification task systematically varied task complexit y. Several direct and derived measures from the task were significantl y correlated with psychometric mental-ability 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 ve rification measures and verbal ability. Moreover, despite its relative verbal complexity, sentence verification did not reflect a greater re lationship to verbal ability than other tasks did. Overall, the inform ation-processing efficiency measures used in this study suggested a fa irly general, rather than a task-specific, relationship to intellectua l ability.