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 work, we examined the popular word puzzle game Wordle as a possible measure of verbal ability in a sample of N = 370 German-speaking adults in this Registered Report. First, we investigated the psychometric properties of the game (e.g., dimensionality, reliability) within an item response theory (IRT) framework. Second, we located Wordle proficiency within a nomological network of cognitive abilities, including vocabulary, declarative knowledge, verbal fluency, and figural reasoning. Third, we examined the correlations between Wordle proficiency and individual differences in age, gender, education, daily reading time, game experience, self-reported strategy use, and an entropy-based measure of strategy efficiency. The findings supported a unidimensional model of Wordle proficiency with moderate reliability (rxx = .68). In a multidimensional IRT model, Wordle proficiency showed its strongest correlations with figural reasoning (r = .50) and verbal fluency (r = .31), a smaller correlation with vocabulary (r = .22), and no meaningful correlation with declarative knowledge (r = .06). Additionally, Wordle proficiency was positively correlated with education, prior experience with the game, and both strategy use and strategy efficiency, and it was negatively correlated with age. This correlational pattern and a response time analysis at the attempt level suggest that Wordle can be understood as a multifaceted problem-solving task that integrates heuristic word retrieval and lexical access with reasoning processes.