Two faces of verbal ability

Abstract

Although psychologists often think and act as though there were only one global domain of verbal ability, there are actually two—verbal comprehension and verbal fluency. For reasons that are not entirely clear, verbal comprehension has received, by far, the most attention in both the psychometric and information-processing literatures. Both are important, pervasive abilities. For example, whereas reading draws primarily on verbal comprehension ability, writing draws primarily on verbal fluency ability; similarly, whereas listening primarily requires verbal comprehension, speaking depends more heavily on verbal fluency. This article seeks to redress some of the imbalance in the literature on the study of these two broad domains of verbal ability. The article is divided into four main parts. The first parts set the stage by placing the study of verbal abilities in a historical context within the field of psychology. The second part describes some alternative approaches to the study of verbal comprehension, summarizing what we have learned from these approaches. The third part reviews some of the few studies that have examined verbal fluency and then describes our own new information-processing approach to the study of this ability. The fourth part explores the relations between the two faces of verbal ability—comprehension and fluency.