Expert performance in solving word puzzles: From retrieval cues to crossword clues

Crossword enthusiasts were first clasified as expert or intermediate on the basis of their performance with a previously unseen set of clues, and then participated in five laboratory experiments designed to capture different aspects of their skilled performance: experiment 1 required the generation of words from a fixed set of letters; experiment 2 monitored the solution of anagrams; experiment 3 required the comipletion of a word of given meaning with only three letters presented; experiment 4 was a lexical decision task with suffixed and pseudosuffixed words and non‐words; and experiment 5 was a synonym judgement task with prefixed and suffixed words Subjects also completed psychometric tests of reasoning and vocabulary. A discriminant function analysis sucessfully predicted the crossword ability of all subjects on the basis of measures of the generation of words from given letters, the number of anagrams solved, sensitivity to a suffix in a non‐word (lexical decision task), sensitivity to a pseudosuffix in a word (synonym judgement task), and vocabulary score. Cryptic crossword puzles are solved by a combination of component subskills, including lexical retrieval, clue recognition, and the manipulation of components of words.