Some Relationships Between Intelligence and Auditory Discrimination

Some of the earliest scientific attempts to understand the nature of intelligence investigated differences in sensory discrimination and reaction time. There is once again interest in the relations between such simple abilities and intelligence, partly as a result of the application of information-processing paradigms to the study of intelligence. Correlations in the range of .3 to .8 have been reported between psychometric measures of intelligence and performance on simple cognitive, sensory, and motor tasks The current study reports correlations between scores on a battery of auditory discrimination tasks and measures of intelligence and academic aptitude in two samples of college students. The correlations between the intellectual and academic aptitude measures and the total percent correct on the auditory battery ranged from .45 to .59. These results are consistent with recent findings of significant relationships between simple sensory, cognitive, and motor abilities and psychometric intelligence as well as with much earlier reports by Spearman (1904) and others of relationships between pitch discrimination and intelligence. An implication of these findings is that intelligence is a potential confounding variable in studies of the auditory perceptual abilities of various clinical populations.

KEY WORDS: intelligence, auditory discrimination, learning disability

Submitted on July 19, 1989
Accepted on July 14, 1990

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