SOME RELATIONSHIPS OF MENTAL APTITUDE, READING ABILITY, AND LISTENING ABILITY USING NORMAL AND TIME-COMPRESSED SPEECH

Three studies tested the differences between reading and listening ability, and performance on comprehension and intelligibility tests using time‐compressed speech, for men of high, average, and low mental aptitudes. The results indicated that there were no differences in reading or listening performance for men of either average or low mental aptitude. The former scored better than the latter on all tests of reading and listening comprehension, regardless of the difficulty level of the material, or whether normal or time‐compressed listening materials were used. The performance of all aptitude groups declined when the speech rate of the listening material was increased, but there were no interactions of speech rate and mental aptitude. On the intelligibility tests, lower aptitude Ss did not discriminate individually presented time‐compressed words as well as did the higher aptitude Ss. Some implications of these results for education and training are presented. Copyright © 1968, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved