In his excellent book A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, former Fortune magazine editor Daniel Seligman describes what it’s like to take the WAIS-R IQ test. One page 5-6, he describes taking the Vocabulary subtest:
…If you have spent your professional life as an editor of a first-rate magazine, you ought to have a pretty good vocabulary, and the WAIS confirms that I do. The drill in this subtest is as follows. Your examiner reads off a list of words–thirty-five in my case–and asks you to define them. If you give a superior answer, going to the heart of the meaning, you get two points; if your answer seems to show only some general understanding of the context in which the word might be used, you get one point; if the answer totally misses the point, you get a goose egg. I got two points on thirty-three of the definitions and one point twice. When [examiner] Stern and I sat down after the test and went over the results, I found myself sadly agreeing that the two one-pointers had in fact reflected somewhat wobbly answers.
Based on the above we can infer that Seligman got a raw score of 68/70 on the Vocabulary subtest. According to the WAIS-R manual, this equates to a scaled score of 17 in the peak age group (20-34) and also 17 in Seligman’s age group (55-64), equivalent to an IQ of 135 (U.S. norms; 134 U.S. white norms) on this one subtest.
[Update Nov 20/2015: because WAIS-R norms were a decade old when Seligman was tested, and the Flynn effect increased WAIS Vocabulary scaled scores by 0.35 points a decade from 1978 to 1995 (Flynn, 2012), his scaled scores must be reduced to 16.65 (IQ 133, U.S. norms, IQ 132 U.S. white norms).]
On page 6 Seligman writes:
Many people do not quite see why vocabulary should be tested in an exercise that is supposed to be measuring mental ability. Their objection: that vocabulary mainly reflects acquired knowledge rather than the ability to learn. In fact, vocabulary is a pretty good proxy for overall IQ: if a professional tester had to make do with just one of the subtests, he would probably land on Vocabulary. The reason it correlates so powerfully with IQ is that you build a vocabulary in a process that requires a lot of reasoning. In your reading and listening, you are endlessly making inferences about different shades of meaning and the different contexts in which words are used. A somewhat similar point might be made about the Information subtest (which many people also view as unrelated to intelligence). You acquire a fund of information not by absorbing data in isolation but by noting the connections between different data. Both Vocabulary and Information correlate about 0.80 with overall IQ…
Pumpkin Person 
Is that Tarn Adams??
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarn_Adams
Whoops, forgot to deduct points for old norms. Added an update to the post in bold.
This may be a basic question but please clarify for me Mr. Person:
If an adult takes an IQ test on a test with old norms, does Flynn Effect still affect his scores? Since Flynn Effect on test scores takes place after he’s reached adulthood, his own personal intellectual development isn’t impacted by FE. Right?
An IQ of 100 by definition means you scored like the average (white) American of your age and birth cohort. But if you take a test that was normed a decade ago, you’re being compared to a previous cohort. Since previous cohorts scored lower than your cohort, getting a score that is average (IQ 100) for the previous cohort, is actually below average compared to your cohort.
OH!! Okay thanks.
Haha, I realized it was a dumb question as soon as Pumpkin explained it.
Like you. You still think that environmental interventions can raise IQ? All evidence says otherwise
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961500135X
The hereditarians are top in IQ research now.
Of course they’re in fucking top. Just now people are realizing that its the genes that allow for civilization, not “culture” or “environment”
Guess what Galton was saying all those centuries ago. Heredity wins always.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1683/20150015.long
But I guess it doesn’t matter. Give it some time, and we’ll be engineering super-geniuses with CRISPR. Hsu’s dream is about to come true soon, and more likely in China than the West.
I guess that’s the only way we can defeat heredity. Find all the genes for intelligence, we have several replicated SNPs already, and splice up paying customers’ foetuses.
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.ca/2015/11/genetic-story-jumps-ahead.html
too bad the flynn effect is reversing in german countries. it will probably be as bad as the image above implies.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615001336
Haha, I realized it was a dumb question as soon as Pumpkin explained it.
LOL! It wasn’t really a dumb question at all,since it’s an issue that is widely misunderstood even by academics studying the field. For example, Richard Lynn’s wikipedia page contains the following criticism of him for adjusting scores for old norms:
Corrections were applied to adjust for differences in IQ cohorts (the “Flynn” effect) on the assumption that the same correction could be applied internationally, without regard to the cultural or economic development level of the country involved. While there appears to be rather little evidence on cohort effect upon IQ across the developing countries, one study in Kenya (Daley, Whaley, Sigman, Espinosa, & Neumann, 2003) shows a substantially larger cohort effect than is reported for developed countries (p.?)[62]
Wikipedia & whoever they’re citing, do not understand that the rate of Flynn effect in different countries was irrelevant, because Lynn was calculating all IQs with reference to Western white norms at the time of the testing, so regardless of whether he was testing Americans or Somalians, IQs earned on tests normed on Western whites had to be reduced based on the Flynn effect in Western whites if those norms were old.
It’s obvious what vocabulary is, but what is ‘information’? What kind of questions are information question?
Vocabulary and digit retention seem to be related in that you would need to be good at memorizing stuff to have a good vocabulary or else you would forget new words soon after coming across them.
The reason it correlates so powerfully with IQ is that you build a vocabulary in a process that requires a lot of reasoning. In your reading and listening, you are endlessly making inferences about different shades of meaning and the different contexts in which words are used.
I think it has more to do with memorization than inferences and reasoning, unless the test gives you some context and asks you to infer the meaning of the word from it. The SAT doesn’t do that and you have to know the definitions beforehand.
??? SAT Reading comprehension requires inference and gives context. The fill in the blank part does too…
My problem with vocabulary tests, and why I’m surprised they correlate so highly with g, is that it’s pretty easy to memorize vocab lists and score artificially high. I studied a lot of Latin roots and vocab for the SAT Verbal, which is why I probably I got 800 on that test (and I got 19/19 on WAIS Vocab).
My problem with vocabulary tests, and why I’m surprised they correlate so highly with g, is that it’s pretty easy to memorize vocab lists and score artificially high. I studied a lot of Latin roots and vocab for the SAT Verbal, which is why I probably I got 800 on that test (and I got 19/19 on WAIS Vocab).
A skill might be easy to improve with memorizing, but if very few people bother doing so, it can remain very g loaded in the general population.
As for your high vocabulary…the fact that you also got a scaled score of 19 on the WAIS-IV Information subtest (another measure of acquired knowledge) suggests it wasn’t so much the memorization you did, but an innate capacity to absorb verbal information
How badly do scores decrease for bilinguals? Also, for the verbal subtests, shouldn’t there be a norming for bilingual people?
Does the psychologist have a book telling them which definition is right, or do they have to go to the dictionary, or is it purely subjective.
Also, if a word has multiple dictionary definitions, are all of them 2 point answers?
Also, since similarities is not timed, isn’t it very very difficult to come up with new connections after the test?
They do have a manual telling them how to score words. That’s all I’ll say.
Similarities is not timed but when you’re sitting in front of a psychologist, you feel pressure to respond within a minute or less.
What do you mean how?
Pumpkin, I have a question. Does studying vocabulary (not the ones on the test), for the intent of getting more intelligent mean practice effect, or does it mean just wanting to increase.
Some people use Dual-n-back for the sole reason to improve memory, it certain,y wouldn’t be practice effect, wouldn’t this logic apply to vocabulary?