Factors Affecting the Difficulty of Verbal Analogies

The purpose of this study was to examine factors that affect the difficulty of verbal analogies in a psychometric exam. Two types of attributes were derived from theoretical cognitive models: (a) knowledge attributes, which were defined by word rarity and the degree to which the relation between the words was intensional, and (b) process attributes, which were defined by the existence of a negative component in the relation between the words, the order of the words, and the extent to which the relations were direct. A total of 104 analogies were characterized using these 5 attributes. Both knowledge and process attributes were found to contribute to the difficulty of verbal analogies.