Relationships in Analogy Items: a Semantic Component of a Psychometric Task

Abstract

The verbal analogy item has played a major role in the measurement of intelligence. Despite numerous correlational studies, however, neither the nature of intelligence nor the nature of the cognitive strategies and semantic structures that govern analogy test performance is well understood. These doubts arise from the apparent inappropriateness of correlational data for studying cognitive processes and structures, and the dearth of experimental research on the analogy item as a cognitive task. As a first step to investigate the analogy item as a cognitive task, the current study attempted to identify a semantic structure of relationships that individuals use to comprehend the completed analogy. A latent partition analysis of subjects' categorizations of keyed analogy items, grouped according to relational similarity, yielded eight latent types of relationships which generalized across subjects and items. Implications of the results for test development and test validity are discussed, and the content of the latent categories are compared to the semantic cognitive structures postulated by major theorists on intelligence.