Level Of Verbal Intelligence Research Articles

Semantic structure in schizophrenia as assessed by the category fluency test: Effect of verbal intelligence and age of onset

It has been reported that long-term memory function, including the semantic structure of category, is impaired in patients with schizophrenia. The present study was performed to determine: (1) whether the deficit in semantic structure in schizophrenia is independent of cultural backgrounds, and (2) the effect of age of onset and verbal intelligence on the degradation of semantic structure in these patients. Fifty-seven Japanese patients with schizophrenia and 33 normal control subjects entered the study. The semantic structure was derived by Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) analysis based on data from the ANIMAL category fluency test. The semantic structure was compared between: (1) schizophrenic patients as a whole vs. normal control subjects; (2) earlier onset (age of onset <20 years) vs. later-onset groups of patients; and (3) high Vocabulary score (score of the Vocabulary subtest from the WAIS-R>7) vs. low Vocabulary score patient groups. Normal control subjects demonstrated the domestic/size dimension in semantic structure, while no such dimension was obtained in patients with schizophrenia. The subgroup comparisons revealed that the later onset or the high Vocabulary score group maintained a relatively intact semantic structure compared with the earlier onset or the low Vocabulary score group, respectively. These findings suggest that the deficit in semantic structure in patients with schizophrenia is commonly observed irrespective of cultural backgrounds, and that age of onset and the level of verbal intelligence are closely related to severity of degradation of the semantic structure in schizophrenia.

Predictors of verbal fluency (FAS) in the healthy elderly

The Verbal Fluency Task (FAS), sensitive indicator of brain injury, was examined in a population of healthy elderly (N = 199, aged 40 to 89 years). The present study was conducted to examine the relative contributions of age, sex, education, verbal intelligence, and specific cognitive abilities to FAS performance. Significant effects were found for vocabulary and sex, although no aging effect was found. Separate norms for sex and level of verbal intelligence are presented. Results indicated that ability to quickly organize information and formulate effective recall strategies played a critical role in good FAS performance.

Relationships between verbal intelligence, educational level and reconstitution of linguistic messages in schizophrenia.

The authors studied the influence of educational and verbal intelligence levels on a linguistic messages reconstitution test with schizophrenics. The two studies undertaken showed significantly lower sentence completion test scores for schizophrenics than for control subjects matched for verbal intelligence, educational level, age and sex. There appears to be an alteration of the cognitive processes underlying the processing and reconstitution of simple messages. This alteration is neither affected by educational level nor verbal intelligence level.