Wordle – A Game-Based Assessment of Verbal Ability?

There is a long and successful tradition of incorporating games into cognitive ability assessment, with recent research exploring the potential of online games as engaging and valid measures of cognitive ability. Building on this, we will examine the popular word puzzle game Wordle as a possible measure of verbal ability in an adult German population in this registered report. First, we will investigate the psychometric properties of the game (e.g., dimensionality, reliability), expecting that a unidimensional model fits the data well. Second, we will locate Wordle proficiency within a nomological network of cognitive abilities, including vocabulary, declarative knowledge, verbal fluency, and figural reasoning. Third, we will explore the correlations of Wordle proficiency with age, gender, education, daily reading time, game experience, self-reported strategy use, and an entropy-based measure of strategy efficiency. The latter will be measured using an entropy-based information gain metric.