{"id":1442,"date":"2017-09-07T00:00:19","date_gmt":"2017-09-07T08:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/?p=1442"},"modified":"2017-09-07T09:25:25","modified_gmt":"2017-09-07T17:25:25","slug":"do-good-scrabble-players-read-more-than-the-rest-of-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/do-good-scrabble-players-read-more-than-the-rest-of-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Good Scrabble\u00ae Players Read More Than the Rest of Us?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Protzner, A. B., Hargreaves, I. S., Campbell, J. A., Myers-Stewart, K., van Hees, S., Goodyear, B. G., … & Pexman, P. M. (2016). This is your brain on Scrabble: neural correlates of visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players as measured during task and resting-state. Cortex<\/i>, 75<\/i>, 204-219.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m a sucker for academic clickbait. This article’s title got me to download it and take a quick peak when I really should have been doing something productive with my time. I am consoled only by the knowledge that by reading this post, you may be no better than I am at impulse control.<\/p>\n

The researchers compared a group of 59-year-old Scrabble\u00ae players to a group of non-Scrabble\u00ae players of the same age and education level (N = 12 per group). Most of the paper is devoted to comparing fMRIs of the subjects’ brains, which I happily skipped over. The interesting stuff actually comes right at the beginning, when the authors report on the results of a set of cognitive tests both groups took before the brain scans.<\/p>\n

The two groups scored about the same on general vocabulary and a “digit-symbol” speed test. More importantly, they did not differ on the amount of pleasure reading<\/strong> they had done (as measured by a “print exposure” checklist<\/a>). Scrabble\u00ae players do not get their particular skill, it seems, by reading more than the rest of us.<\/p>\n

The Scrabble\u00ae players were about 20% faster at identifying words versus non-words, and did a slightly better on generating as many words as possible in a short amount of time (e.g. “Say as many words as you can that begin with the letter F in the next 60 seconds”). The biggest difference, however, was on an\u00a0magrana<\/del> anagram test: Scrabble\u00ae players absolutely killed it, getting on average 55 out of 60 correct, compared to only 19 for the non-Scrabble\u00ae subjects.<\/p>\n

But of course doing anagrams is pretty much what Scrabble is all about, which leads me to conclude that playing Scrabble\u00ae makes you good at playing Scrabble\u00ae, but not much else. (This is also true for some of the so-called “skills” literacy researchers like to measure, as I discussed previously.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Protzner, A. B., Hargreaves, I. S., Campbell, J. A., Myers-Stewart, K., van Hees, S., Goodyear, B. G., … & Pexman, P. M. (2016). This is your brain on Scrabble: neural correlates of visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players as measured during task and resting-state. Cortex, 75, 204-219. I’m a sucker for academic clickbait. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1442"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1453,"href":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442\/revisions\/1453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}