Word Finders: Cognitive Abilities in Scrabble Expert Players

ZAMORA, DOLORES JAZMÍN; SORIANO, FEDERICO GONZALO; MARTÍNEZ-CUITIÑO, MACARENA

Conferencia; Words in the World (WoW) International Conference; 2020

Over recent years, a number of questions have been raised concerning expertise inSCRABBLE; researchers have attempted to identify and explain the processes involved during agame. Previous studies have explained Scrabble expertise by enhanced performance on differentcognitive functions, such as visual word recognition (Hargreaves et al., 2012), verbal and visualworking memory (Toma et al., 2014) or semantic knowledge (Halpern & Wai, 2007). The aim ofthe current study is to investigate potential differences between Scrabble expert players and non-players in those cognitive domains. Eleven expert Scrabble players and 13 non-players were assessed in visual lexical decision task; visual, digit and syllabic phonological span tasks;vocabulary, analogy and semantic fluency tasks. Behavioral results showed that experts are faster in recognizing words and have better verbal and visuospatial abilities, and a better semantic storagecapacity and retrieval. These findings suggest that the expertise of Scrabble players cannot beexplained by a single cognitive domain; rather, it would involve a number of differential abilities.In contrast with previous research, in this study expert players showed more advantages in semantic processing. In the future, a longitudinal analysis of Scrabble players? cognitive performance could contribute to clinical neuropsychology. As the game is also available for mobile devices and players do not require professional guidance, SCRABBLE could be a complementary rehabilitation tool in neuropsychology therapy.