Relationship between Acculturation, Cognitive Style, and Intelligence

Abstract

The relationship of degree of Anglo-American acculturation to analytic cognitive style, nonverbal intelligence, and verbal intelligence was investigated using a cross-sectional development design. The results suggest that cognitive style does not play a particularly important role in an individual's performance on intelligence tests. In this study Mexican-Americans were no different from Anglos in nonverbal intellectual ability, but they performed less well on the vocabulary subtest. Overall this suggests that a relatively lower verbal facility, rather than analytic ability or cognitive style, contributed to the poorer performance of Mexican-Americans on standardized verbal intelligence tests. However, when Mexican-Americans become similar to Anglos in acculturation there is no significant difference between the groups on these important reference tests.