Do asians really lag in verbal?
AoR writes about the commonly perceived advantage east asians have in visio-spatial (math) iq. i’m not going to spend much time on that b/c i haven’t seen much evidence to the contrary, and at least they do alright in competition. but something that isn’t especially clear to me is the evidence on a lag on verbal scores.
as AoR cited, 97 asian-american verbal iq is a number i’ve seen bandied about in the bell curve, and richard lynn’s comparisons of different national verbal scores show asians with a lower verbal. exactly how the tests were done however is something i still don’t know. the lower verbal score for asian-americans might, in part, be due to a slower start in english b/c their parents spoke an asian language at home. a friend of mine took an iq test at his school’s urging after arriving in the states from taiwan as a young teenager. he did well on the visio-spatial part of the test, but horrible on the verbal. he said that he barely understood half the english questions at the time b/c he had only recently arrived. by the end of high school, he was in AP english and graduated salutatorian in his class (an ABC grabbed 1st).





