bject has not attended school the
equivalent of two or three years.

It has been contended by some that tests in which success depends upon
language mastery cannot be real tests of intelligence. By such critics
language tests have been set over against intelligence tests as
contrasting opposites. It is easy to show, however, that this view is
superficial and psychologically unsound. Every one who has an
acquaintance with the facts of mental growth knows that language mastery
of some degree is the _sine qua non_ of conceptual thinking. Language
growth, in fact, mirrors the entire mental development. There are few
more reliable indications of a subject's stage of intellectual maturity
than his mastery of language.

The rate of reading, for example, is a measure of the rate of
association. Letters become associated together in certain combinations
making words, words into word groups and sentences. Recognition is for
the most part an associative process. Rapid and accurate association
will mean ready recognition of the printed form. Since language units
(whether letters, words, or word groups) have more or less preferred
associations according to their habitual arrangement into larger units,
it comes about that in the normal mind under normal conditions these
preferred sequences arouse the apperceptive complex necessary to make a
running recognition rapid and easy. It is reasonable to suppose that in
the subnormal mind the habitual common associations are less firmly
fixed, thus diminishing the effectiveness of the ever-changing
apperceptive expectancy. Reading is, therefore, largely dependent on
what James calls the "fringe of consciousness" and the "consciousness of
meaning." In reading connected matter, every unit is big with a mass of
tendencies. The smaller and more isolated the unit, the greater is the
number of possibilities. Every added unit acts as a modifier limiting
the number of tendencies, until we have finally, in case of a large
mental unit, a fairly manageable whole. When the most logical and
suitable of these associations arise easily from subconsciousness to
consciousness, recognition is made easy, and their doing so will depend
on whether the habitual relations of the elements have left permanent
traces in the mind.

The reading of the subnormal subject bears a close analogy to the
reading of nonsense matter by the normal person. It has been ascertained
by experiment that such reading requires about t