> East Asians living overseas score about the same or slightly lower than whites on verbal IQ and substantially higher on visuospatial IQ. Even in the rare studies that have found overall Japanese or Chinese IQs no higher than white IQs [...], the discrepancy between verbal and visuospatial IQ persists. For Japanese living in asia, a 1987 review of the literature demonstrated without much question that the verbal-visuospatial difference persists even in examinations that have been thoroughly adapted to the Japanese language and, indeed, in tests developed by the Japanese themselves.
> This finding has an echo in the United States, where Asian-American students abound in engineering, in medical schools, and in graduate programs in the sciences, but are scarce in law schools and graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences.
> [Philip] Vernon's overall appraisal was that the mean Asian-American IQ is about 97 on verbal tests and about 110 on visuospatial tests.
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Richard Lynn discusses the pattern in Race Differences in Intelligence:
> [Row 16] shows an exaggerated version of the typical East Asian pattern of high reasoning IQ (108), higher spatial IQ (114), and weaker verbal IQ (92).
> Two conclusions can be drawn from the studies summarized in table 10.1.
> The first is that all the East Asian IQs are a little higher than those of Europeans, except for the Chen et al. (1996) studies of general information in Japan and Taiwan, and the Georgas et al. (2003) result for South Korea, all of which give East Asians an IQ of 100. [...] The median IQ of the studies is 105 and should be taken as the best estimate of the IQs of indigenous East Asians.
> Second, eleven of the studies contain measures of verbal and visualization abilities and in ten of these the visualization IQ is greater than the verbal IQ (the study in row 36 [finding a verbal IQ of 121 [!?] and visual of 109 in 454 Japanese children in Nagoya aged 5-7 years] is the exception). The mean and median differences between the two abilities are both 12 IQ points. This difference appears in a variety of tests. The finding of the stronger visualization abilities and weaker verbal abilities is so consistently present and so large that it appears to be a real phenomenon.
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I'll editorialize here to note that an average 12-point difference between Asian verbal ability and Asian visuospatial ability dwarfs the average 5-point difference between Asian ability overall and white ability overall. This is a case where the point estimate for IQ has lost significant, valuable information.
I can provide some low-effort citations:
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The Bell Curve has this to say:
> East Asians living overseas score about the same or slightly lower than whites on verbal IQ and substantially higher on visuospatial IQ. Even in the rare studies that have found overall Japanese or Chinese IQs no higher than white IQs [...], the discrepancy between verbal and visuospatial IQ persists. For Japanese living in asia, a 1987 review of the literature demonstrated without much question that the verbal-visuospatial difference persists even in examinations that have been thoroughly adapted to the Japanese language and, indeed, in tests developed by the Japanese themselves.
> This finding has an echo in the United States, where Asian-American students abound in engineering, in medical schools, and in graduate programs in the sciences, but are scarce in law schools and graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences.
> [Philip] Vernon's overall appraisal was that the mean Asian-American IQ is about 97 on verbal tests and about 110 on visuospatial tests.
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Richard Lynn discusses the pattern in Race Differences in Intelligence:
> [Row 16] shows an exaggerated version of the typical East Asian pattern of high reasoning IQ (108), higher spatial IQ (114), and weaker verbal IQ (92).
> Two conclusions can be drawn from the studies summarized in table 10.1.
> The first is that all the East Asian IQs are a little higher than those of Europeans, except for the Chen et al. (1996) studies of general information in Japan and Taiwan, and the Georgas et al. (2003) result for South Korea, all of which give East Asians an IQ of 100. [...] The median IQ of the studies is 105 and should be taken as the best estimate of the IQs of indigenous East Asians.
> Second, eleven of the studies contain measures of verbal and visualization abilities and in ten of these the visualization IQ is greater than the verbal IQ (the study in row 36 [finding a verbal IQ of 121 [!?] and visual of 109 in 454 Japanese children in Nagoya aged 5-7 years] is the exception). The mean and median differences between the two abilities are both 12 IQ points. This difference appears in a variety of tests. The finding of the stronger visualization abilities and weaker verbal abilities is so consistently present and so large that it appears to be a real phenomenon.
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I'll editorialize here to note that an average 12-point difference between Asian verbal ability and Asian visuospatial ability dwarfs the average 5-point difference between Asian ability overall and white ability overall. This is a case where the point estimate for IQ has lost significant, valuable information.