This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Gary Miranda
Kaiser Foundation Hospitals Portland, Ore

JAMA. 1996;275(24):1879.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—As an editor at a research institution, I doubted that scientists such as Dr Snowdon and colleagues¹ could recognize high linguistic ability when they saw it. Bias aside, however, I detect certain misconceptions in the article about the nature of linguistic ability. Specifically, I would question their measures of high linguistic ability—grammatical complexity and density of ideas. In my experience, these qualities in a sample of writing reflect either a deliberate attempt to conceal one's meaning or, more commonly, sloppy thinking and poor writing skills.

What the findings fail to take into account is the distinction between reading and writing. As the authors note, psycholinguists originally developed these measures of linguistic ability to categorize texts according to how difficult they are to read and understand. The capacity to comprehend writing characterized by grammatical complexity and density of ideas may indeed reflect a high linguistic ability. However, . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?