Intensity of Meaning Discrimination in Academic Achievers and Underachievers

Abstract

Academic achievers and underachievers were compared on an index of meaning discrimination to see whether achievers would display a finer degree of discrimination between high and low meaningful verbal stimuli than underachievers. The hypothesis stems from a previous finding that underachievers tend to be linguistically rigid, from which it was inferred that underachievers may be poor in discriminating the uniquely meaningful features of their environment. When the index of meaning discrimination was administered to 25 achievers and 25 underachievers, defined according to predicted performance in university, data supported the hypothesis, showing for these Ss definite differences in discrimination of meaningfulness.