Verbal reasoning is the part of CAT4 that’s least like school. It isn’t a test of vocabulary, spelling, or comprehension — and a child who reads voraciously isn’t automatically good at it. What it tests is the ability to see relationships between words, hold them in working memory, and apply them to a new pair. It’s a thinking skill that uses words as the raw material, in the same way the non-verbal sub-tests use shapes.
The CAT4 verbal battery has two sub-tests: verbal classification and verbal analogies. Both feel slightly odd the first time a child meets them, and both reward a small amount of practice with the format more than they reward a big tutoring effort.
Verbal classification
The instruction is roughly: “Here are three words that go together. Pick the word from the answer choices that goes with them.”
Worked example. Three words: apple, plum, peach. Choices: carrot, cherry, potato, lettuce, oak. The right answer is cherry: the three given words are all soft fruits with a stone or core, and cherry is the only choice that fits. Carrot and potato are vegetables; lettuce is a leaf; oak is a tree (the wrong category entirely).
The trick is that the relationship is rarely as obvious as “they’re all fruit”. It might be:
- All four-legged mammals (so birds, fish, insects don’t fit).
- All things you can write on (paper, slate, parchment — but not pen, ink, or pencil).
- All words for to look at quickly (glance, peek, glimpse — but not stare or watch).
Children who do well on classification have learnt to try several relationships in their head before committing. They aren’t necessarily faster readers. They’re more methodical: “what’s the rule that links all three?” before “which answer fits?”
A common failure mode: latching onto a surface feature. If the three words are robin, sparrow, eagle, a child might lock onto “all birds” and pick the answer that’s also a bird — even when the right relationship is more specific (e.g. “all birds that fly” excluding penguin or ostrich, if those are among the answer choices).
Verbal analogies
The instruction is: “Word A is to Word B as Word C is to ___?”
Worked example. Cat is to kitten as dog is to ___. Choices: puppy, bone, paw, bark, terrier. The relationship is adult animal → its young. The answer is puppy.
Worked example, harder. Hot is to scorching as cold is to ___. Choices: ice, freezing, snow, winter, frost. The relationship is temperature → extreme version of the same temperature. The answer is freezing. The wrong answers are all cold-themed nouns; freezing is the only one that’s an extreme adjective.
Analogies are pattern-spotting in language. The relationships your child needs to be comfortable with include:
- Synonym / extreme synonym (big → enormous, tired → exhausted).
- Antonym (hot → cold, ascend → descend).
- Object → category (sparrow → bird).
- Object → function (knife → cut, pen → write).
- Whole → part (book → page, tree → branch).
- Action → person who does it (teach → teacher, write → writer).
Most children find some of these intuitive and others alien. The verbal analogies that catch out otherwise-strong children are usually the function and whole-part ones, where the relationship feels less like a “definition” and more like a “use”.
How to practise verbal reasoning sensibly
Three things that work, three that don’t.
Works: reading aloud and explaining what a sentence means. Listening to your child explain why an answer is right, not just what it is. A few short, low-stakes sessions — five questions on the way to school, not 30 in a Saturday-morning marathon.
Doesn’t: memorising long lists of synonyms and antonyms. Rote vocab is not what verbal reasoning tests; the questions almost always use words your child already knows. The bottleneck is the reasoning, not the dictionary.
Doesn’t: reading more comprehension passages. It feels productive — and reading widely is a good thing for its own sake — but it doesn’t directly improve classification or analogy performance, because comprehension is a different skill.
Works: a small, consistent daily exposure to the format itself. Children who have seen the shape of a verbal classification question fifty times don’t waste mental energy decoding the instruction during the test, which leaves more energy for the actual reasoning.
What a strong verbal profile looks like
A child with a high verbal SAS is usually a child who already enjoys words — who plays with them, asks what unfamiliar ones mean, and notices when an adult uses one in a slightly off way. Bilingual children sometimes score lower than expected on the verbal battery in their second language and significantly higher in their first; it’s worth bearing this in mind when reading the report. The same is true for children who have only recently started reading independently — their verbal reasoning may catch up to their non-verbal reasoning over a year or two.
If your child’s verbal SAS is the lowest of the four batteries, the answer isn’t more vocabulary drills. It’s more time spent thinking out loud about words: “what’s the difference between sad and miserable? Are quick and fast exactly the same? Why do we say flock of birds but herd of cows?” That kind of conversation does more for verbal reasoning than any worksheet.
Useful next reads
- The parent’s guide to CAT4 — what CAT4 is and isn’t.
- Non-verbal reasoning explained — the companion piece for the NVR battery.
- CAT4 practice on Puzzitron — verbal classification and analogies with worked answers.