There are very many "verbal reasoning" tests out there; this test is different. It is a combined test of vocabulary and deep understanding.
A verbal reasoning test generally is a test of logical reasoning, presented in words. For example:
The above sorts of test questions are designed to determine the test-taker's logic-and-reasoning skill. So as not to "contaminate" that determination, many tests avoid using all but the simplest vocabulary words. Sometimes this is also done to make a test "culture-fair", suitable for folks with reading disabilities, etc.
Many such tests are good at their intended purpose, there's nothing wrong with them, they do a good job of assessing what they mean to. But despite the word "verbal" they typically don't test vocabulary.
It turns out that for a relatively fast, accurate determination of I.Q., a vocabulary test often does the best job. Simply put: people with very strong/extensive vocabularies (for their age) tend to be smart - or vice versa. Of course one immediately thinks of:
Research over the decades has shown that the above concerns are not really as significant as one might think. For example smart children from poor families will often seek out for themselves, reading materials from schools, libraries, or even (in some famous cases) municipal dumps. As for non-readers, it turns out that smarter people tend to enjoy reading, and have a drive to do it. Poor reading instruction in school turns out to not matter so much - as good readers, no matter their formal education, learn vocabulary words from context. Not from drills, nor required memorization, nor inspired teachers nor excellent instruction. (Nor from assiduous parental attempts to turn the child into a "lifelong lover of reading" as I discovered myself.)
So in the end and despite misgiving, objections, and even attacks - the single best measure of I.Q. - if you had to use only one - might well be a vocabulary test.
However, there are tests and there are tests.
Classic I.Q. tests such as the Wechsler tests (including the WISC or Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) include a vocabulary section where a single word is presented to the child, who is asked to define it. The test administrator - presumably an adult who knows all the words - assigns a score to each response, basically indicating that the child didn't know the word, or else "kind of" knew it, or completely and fully understood the word and could easily explain its meaning(s).
Paper-and-pencil vocabulary tests typically will present the word, along with options designed to find if the test-taker knows the word, or not. For example:
A test question like that is really a test of all 6 words; you kind of have to know them all, to get it right. On the other hand, an easier question, like this one, may be easier to guess:Given the word on the left, which of the 5 words on the right is the best match?
Cantankerous Malignant | Argumentative | Prepackaged | Voluminous | Dancing
Given the word on the left, which of the 5 words on the right is the best match?
Big Felicitous | Enormous | Sonambulistic | Prevaricate | Platitudinous
A lot of folks know the word "Enormous" so can get this question right even if they don't know any of the other words.
That is fine, the test can still be a good vocabulary test, it can still get the job done, be a decent test - or part of one - of I.Q.
However it is, or can be, relatively easy. Of course you can make any vocabulary test harder just by using rare, obscure words. But this strategy can be counterproductive; due to concerns similar to the above. Do we really want to conclude that someone isn't smart, just because they happen to not know the word "eleemosynary?" (Personally I can never remember what that word means - whenever I see it I have to look it up and then I promptly forget it - concluding that whoever used it should write using simpler English. So, just 'cause I hate the word, does that make me dumb? Perhaps I'm just cantankerous.)
Though there are some so-called (or self-called) philosophers of language who insist that some particular language (English, German, others) are "perfect" and/or "superior to all others", this is not a serious point of view. For, no language completely describes every fact of reality, perfectly, accurately, and completely. You (generally) learn this pretty fast when you study another language - you find out that the language contains words that "kind of" mean the same thing as the word in your own language, but only "sort of". To translate some word you have in mind, into that language, you may need to use more than one word; and/or choose from an assortment (each of which you have to first learn). Also - if you're honest and a good student - you find that the other language has words which aptly, succinctly, and interestingly describe concepts, and/or frame or categorize or describe things, better than any word in your own language. This among other things results in multilingual persons occasionally using a foreign word, when writing in English, for example - to the frustration of English-speakers who may not know (or want to learn, or study, or look up, or figure out) what "schadenfreude" means. "Just write it in English!" But maybe that's not so easy.
Within a single language - in this case, English - we also find words whose meanings are not exactly the same, but you can see the connection. Sometimes this is easy: for example "frowzy" versus "rumpled" have more or less the same denotation but "frowsy" has a pejorative (or negative) connotation. Other cases are less clear; for example one English thesaurus indicates the following synonyms for the word "abstemious":
You can see that all those words kind of get at the same concept (or maybe not - I for example didn't know the word "abstentious"), but none of them mean exactly the same thing. In addition, the word "temperate" could be a synonym for "mild" as in climate, and the word "continent" of course could "belong with" other words like "mountain" and "ocean".
There is more to write about all of this, but to keep it short I'll just say that it is possible to craft a "Vocabulary Reasoning" test which measures two things; the test-taker's:
In other words, you're not just assessing whether a test-taker can rattle off the definition of a word - which could actually, and in practice sometimes is, accomplished simply by
Rather, you're measuring something a lot deeper - the test-taker's grasp of reality, as represented by their mastery of the system of representation of that reality, which we call, in a word, "language".
I first encountered this notion, of using vocabulary to "go deeper than denotation", when I read a paper1 which presented and made use of a couple related examples of this technique. That vocabulary test (intended for English-speaking adults) used two techniques, one of which I use in my own instrument, that is, "2 of 5"; also a "3 of 5" approach. For example:
Of these 5 words, pick the two synonyms:
Which 3 of the following 5 go together?
For variety, and to exercise the test-taker's mind, the above question can just as well be phrased "Of the 5, which two don't fit?" And it turns out that a lot of other variant types of questions are possible. Some of them are interesting and some of them may test something that's akin to a real-world capability that is both valuable and not universal. For example, this question (or challenge, or assignment, or task):
Make pairs or triplets of these words:
| aspire | make | pacify | strive |
| craft | ease | hostile | soothe |
| grumpy | do | intend | cranky |
Make pairs or triplets of these words:
| ameliorate | inject | scold | penetrate |
| formulate | castigate | make up | create |
| disparage | calm | puncture | soothe |
However they might be able to figure out a word or two, from context. Their ability to do so, would also evince intelligence, also resulting in a higher score on the test. Oh, not to mention that this is a way that smart folks learn new words - by proximity, association.
Here is another kind of question that requires the test-taker to know both the meanings of words, and also the interrelationships - including both similarities and "distinguishing factors" between them:
Organize or sort these 12 words into categories. How many categories? That is up to you.
Optionally, name each category.
discontinuation expiration stoppage allegiance benevolence pause faith devotion kindness fidelity interruption mercy
This example is kind of easy as there are just two categories, more or less obvious. Just as obvious: when constructing a question (or test item, or "stimulus") like this, you have a lot of leeway in:
If you do allow/include antonyms as mentioned above, then you also need to deal with the likely result that some people will consider a set of words to be a single category; others will stipulate that there are two categories. One example would be a list of virtue-related words that consists of both virtues and vices.
This particular kind of test question, is not merely an academic exercise or a esoteric research tool. Skill at categorization - that is, the ability to take a large set of items and organize them into sets that "hang together" and make coherent related groups with real-world relevance and functional meaning, is an important skill. I became aware of it during long-range planning workshops in which dozens - sometimes well over 100 - of various ideas, proposals, and suggestions were generated. For this task paper works as well as other tools, meaning, you end up with, say, 120 small pieces of paper on a large work surface, each one with an idea written on it. It's your job to categorize them into sets that would "go together" and, for example, be worked on by a team, considered as a single project. To my surprise some people were able to look at the scattered mess, start shuffling pieces of paper around, and in short order come up with some pretty good, workable categories of items which all "hung together", "went together", made sense to group together. Other people just looked at the mess and gave up before even trying to start.
It is hard to say how well a test like this one, could predict a person's ability to do that sort of management/organizational/planning task in the future. It'd be an interesting research project.
Regarding point 5 in the previous section, that is, the nature of words used in this/a Vocabulary Reasoning test. We can see in the above example that one of the two categories consists of virtues. This is intentional. Tests are well-known teachers; a test-taker presented with a set of concepts, gains more practice with them; they gain more - or at least some - familiarity. The concept is similar to that of "push-polling" - well-known to advertisers, marketers, political consultants.
I have not come up with my tests in a vacuum; I am affected by the people around me. A concern I hear from employers and others is, whether or not the person in question, is honest, moral. The concern can take this form: "OK, great, fine and good, you're going to identify a bunch of smart young people; maybe I could be interested." (For example, in hiring them.) "But how do I know that I'm not bringing an evil genius into my organization?"
I don't know of a good quick test for morality and I figure that if a person tried to come up with a test like that, a smart person would be able to outfox the test. (There are plenty of pre-employment tests which attempt to do exactly this - folks I've talked to see them as laughingly inadequate, it's so obvious what the "right answer" is that the employer wants, whether it actually represents you and/or you agree with it or not.) So in answer to the above question I can only say what the questioner already knows: "I can't give you any assurances about that." (Not from a single test, anyway.)
However it is possible to test to see, if the test-taker has at least had some exposure - perhaps even rudimentary, perhaps more - to the concepts of virtue ethics, natural consequences, societal requirements and mandates, religious precepts.
Therefore I tend to scatter ethical and judgment terms, into these vocabulary tests. It doesn't hurt anything and the kids/tweens/teens don't mind it; in fact young children are zealously interested in matters ethical.** Using such terms can, I believe, align with assessing intelligence, as fluency in these concepts - especially their interrelationship - requires intelligence.
**I led "Young Philosophers" philosophy discussion groups for children/tweens for a number of years.
There are several other sections of the OVRT, all of which offer differing ways of combining 1) reasoning ability with 2) mastery of vocabulary - or really, concepts. As the OVRT is really a tookit, not a test, these suggestions (e.g. Double and/or Triple meanings, interruptions in order or "Out of order") are available for you to explore. For now I will just let I will just mention them here in passing and let you do just that - explore them; see if they may be useful.
Perhaps chief among these, therefore bearing more elucidation, is the section about "Combination." The sample test lays out how there are, in theory, some 64 question types. Even using simple words, a pretty sophisticated, or even challenging, test may be constructed. The sample test contains some examples; here are some more:
| Question type or structure | Actual question | Word Choices |
| Direct conceptual relation, synonym, noun and noun, no negation | Saw is to knife as hammer is to | nail, workbench, mallet, handle, punish |
| Distant conceptual relation, synonym, noun and noun, no negation | Knife is to apportion as pencil is to | enlighten, paper, eraser, erudition, graffiti |
| Direct conceptual relation, noun and adjective "alike", no negation | Match is to fiery as extinguisher is to | happy, safety, precarious, depressed, sensible |
| Indirect conceptual relation, noun and adverb "alike", no negation | Spatula is to tastily as shoe is to | swiftly, boot, boxed, sock, happily |
| Indirect conceptual relation, noun and adverb "alike", negation | Pillow is to groggily as table is not to | chair, food, full, covered, hungrily |
| Distant conceptual relation, antonym, noun and adjective, negation | Vase is to sprinkler as motley is not to | plain, excellent, previous, variegated, diminished |
| No conceptual relation, synonym, adverb and adjective "alike", no negation | Swimmingly is to elevated as proudly is to | humbly, seeming, self-satisfied, tentative, humorous |
| Direct conceptual relation, antonym, noun and noun, no negation | A woman needs a man like a fish needs a | bicycle, aquarium, wormy, hungrily, feeding |
The OVRT is intended to be a toolkit enabling the rapid (responsive) instantiation of a decent (somewhat informative, indicative, valid) test. Just as semiotics consists of
constructing an instance of an OVRT requires
In fulfilment of the above:
A step-by-step detailed procedure - like a "recipe" - is beyond the scope of this document. Partly because your own "user experience" will vary depending on, for example whether you use the tools online or download them, which kinds of browsing utilities your organization provides or that you personally have, and what size paper you use (European and/or Commonwealth users might need to adjust layouts and margins to suit an A4 paper size.) More importantly, while the OVRT does intend to make your job easier, putting both template and content at your fingertips - competence is still required. An excellent mastery of the English language is required; also some ability (or "moxie") to figure out how to do such things as first fine and then explore/browse through files, copy and paste, and most importantly, recognize what a certain question form just won't work with certain vocabulary words/terms. (For example there is no English antonym for "dentist".)
But briefly:
And remember that your are licensed to do all this according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
Here are the "raw ingredients" which you may use to assemble the various subtests of the OVRT:
1 A New, Open Source English Vocabulary Test
Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, Meng Hu and Jurij Fedorov
10.46469/mq.2024.65.2.7
https://mankindquarterly.org/archive/issue/65-2/7
The paper is well worth reading, as it covers everything I write here but in a much more rigorous manner, with a lot more detail. For example it explains the same thing I do above in my section "Vocabulary plus (inter-word) reasoning", like so:
which is much more concise than my own explanation, though I had to look up the word "educe" to understand it.[M]ost words in a person's vocabulary are learned through inferences of their meaning, by the eduction of relations and correlates (Jensen, 1998, p. 89).
Thanks to Flocabulary (https://www.flocabulary.com/wordlists/) for their WordUp Project and for freely offering graded word lists.
Resources:
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according to their own statement ("This vocabulary list is free
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