Published on 12, July, 2020
I have a question re verbal analogies are they pure measures of verbal intelligence , or are they a mix of logic and verbal skills ? Also do people on the spectrum have problems with them? I ask because I did a Queendom verbal test and scored 86 for analogies but 138 for vocabulary and 143 for verbal comprehension. I notice at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3606476/ verbal analogies are described as being at an abstract level and vocabulary at a concrete level. I certainly have a problem with abstract things. The nurse who does my antipsychotic depot described me as being a concrete thinker. I found this
Verbal analogies also entail relational inference. For instance, in BOOK : PAGE :: CAR : ENGINE one must infer that a PAGE is a part of a BOOK just as an ENGINE is a part of a CAR. My more recent research has investigated how individual differences (in creativity, working memory, or autistic traits) impact performance in solving verbal analogies with pairs from similar domains (e.g., PLATINUM : NECKLACE :: GOLD : EARRING) or different domains (e.g., LEATHER : SADDLE :: GOLD : EARRING).
https://clasprofiles.wayne.edu/profile/eg3564
I would say verbal analogies are a mix. Obviously you need some verbal skills to know how a word or phrase is used, but relating that analogically uses one of the logical skills that used to be described as 'verbal reasoning'.
I remember in IQ tests how 'BOOK : PAGE :: CAR : ENGINE' was written as 'BOOK is to PAGE as CAR is to ?' and you're supposed to work out what the 'is to' relationship might be, and then apply it to CAR. I can see why this is a mental function used in understanding analogies ('my mind is like a leaky bucket') and metaphors ('a flood of letters', 'it's raining in my heart', 'the heavens opened'), but not similes ('like a monsoon'). However, you also need to understand what on Earth 'is to' means - it's not exactly an everyday phrase. Do you know how your score of '86' compares to average? It doesn't sound particularly low.
And what are the differences with autistic people? It's hard to say, but I'd be willing to bet that we are more varied on the concrete-abstract dimension than neurotypical people. I am possibly opposite to you: extraordinarily abstract, always taking concrete facts (or words) and making theories and patterns from them.
Here's a related thread:
http://community.autism.org.uk/f/adults-on-the-autistic-spectrum/11812/iq-please-help-significant-difference-between-viq-and-piq/64536#64536
You often hear that autistic people are relatively poor at understanding figures of speech, and tend to take stuff literally. That may be true for some people, but I've not found it generally. We probably do tend to be more focussed and precise. I would say ENGINE above was a rubbish answer, because there's only one engine in a car, and a page doesn't make a book go. Better might be WHEEL, MOTOR PART, SEAT or MIRROR (you could also argue that functionally rather than structurally, PLACE or MILE were good answers). If you say GLOVE COMPARTMENT, maybe you haven't quite understood the point of the exercise, and are still relating BOOK to CAR, which isn't the point. What you abstract from 'BOOK : PAGE' is a concept that could be verbalised as 'contains' or 'has as a part' or (if you want to be pretentious) 'is a holonym to a corresponding meronym'. That concept has had the concrete idea of books or pages completely removed from it. Where I would suggest there might be an autistic difference is that a neurotypical person might say to themselves 'a BOOK contains pages ... is to means contains... CAR contains... ENGINE' in the natural language they have been taught, an autistic person might have a geometrical or pictorial view of the relationship that doesn't rely on language as such (such as in Temple Grandin's Thinking in Pictures or Paul Dirac in The Strangest Man)
As far as I can make out 86 falls into the low average range(80-89) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification
I did another test at http://alliqtests.com/tests/take_test/70/1/ which seems to be a mix of verbal and general knowledge and scored 144+.
I did find https://www.kyrene.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&ModuleInstanceID=1054&ViewID=7b97f7ed-8e5e-4120-848f-a8b4987d588f&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=856&PageID=1050 which suggests it tests inductive and deductive reasoning skills.
Right. Induction is working from specifics to generalisations, while deduction is the reverse, working from a general rule to apply it to specifics. (Some might say induction isn't strictly speaking logical, as in 'Every swan I have seen in white, and so are these, therefore the universal rule is that all swans are white.')
In a sense, analogical thinking uses both, and verbal analogies use a verbal comprehension, a kind of induction to guess a relationship ('the second word is always part of the first)' between BOOK and PAGE, and a deduction to apply that to other specifics, like FILM and SCENE, and finally a bit more verbal skill possibly to express the answer.
I know nothing about Queendom, but wondered if the tests were based at 100 a bit like IQ tests.
Further to this.
Inductive and deductive reasoning are two methods of logic used to arrive at a conclusion based on information assumed to be true
http://www.nakedscience.org/mrg/Deductive%20and%20Inductive%20Reasoning.htm . Taken with the suggestion that verbal analogies test inductive and deductive reasoning this points to verbal analogies being a test of both logic and verbal ability. Hence not a pure test of verbal ability.