Elementary schoolchildren in protective headgear
Elementary schoolchildren wear protective headgear as they walk to school in Tokyo, April 25, 2011. Reuters

In order to find out whether there is any association between the act of reading and intelligence; scientists from University of Edinburgh and King's College London, came up with a comparison of the results obtained from reading and intelligence tests from 2,000 pairs of identical twins who participated in the Twins Early Development Study.

The work which got published in the journal Child Development claims that “having strong reading skills as a child is a predictor for higher intelligence levels as a young adult.”

The tests were taken up by the twins who were aged 7, 9, 10, 12 and 16.
In this work, twins were taken into consideration because they are genetically identical and they were raised in the same family environment.
It was found that “twins with better early reading ability than their identical sibling would not only remain better at reading as they grew older, but would also score higher than their twin on general intelligence tests.”

"According to the report by Medical News Today; it’s not too surprising that being better at reading might improve your vocabulary, lead author Stuart Ritchie told; but it is more surprising that there were effects on nonverbal intelligence."

In order to carry out this study, Ritchie and his team set the children standard IQ test to grade their general intelligence. This involved testing of vocabulary and general knowledge for verbal IQ and pattern-completion reasoning puzzles for nonverbal IQ.

“To answer the query put across by Medical News Today Ritchie further explained that emotional intelligence, and even more so 'multiple intelligences,' are controversial constructs," many psychological scientists do not recognise them as "intelligences.”

General intelligence "has been shown in hundreds of studies across the past century to relate strongly to educational success, occupational success, and even health," pointing out that people who score higher on intelligence tests tend to live longer, Ritchie concluded.