Two psychometric profiles of gifted children in referred samples: The need to distinguish between homogeneous and crystallized profiles

Detecting giftedness is a high-stake issue in psychological assessment. Often defined as intellectual performance in the top 2.5 %, giftedness concerns a substantial share of the general population; giftedness identification is also one of the most frequent motivations for intelligence testing in children. Despite the importance of this topic, there has rarely been consistent research in the methods used to classify an individual as gifted in the context of psychological assessment. Psychometric profiles associated with giftedness, in particular, have not been systematically explored, despite the possibility that there are subtypes of giftedness with different implications for research and practice. We collected the assessment results of a sample of 739 children identified as gifted after completing Wechsler's Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV or WISC-V), in one of five different testing locations in France or Belgium. Profile analyses revealed the existence of two distinct psychometric profiles, each comprising roughly half the sample. One group of children had consistently high performance on all indices; whereas the other group had very high performance specifically on verbal comprehension subtests tapping into crystallized intelligence, but mild performance everywhere else. These results clearly support the idea that there are two roads to giftedness: some children reach the cutoff of giftedness based on high cognitive abilities overall, whereas others are particularly adept at leveraging a capital of acquired knowledge in verbal tasks. These two profiles have different implications for the real-life achievement of gifted individuals, leading to major consequences for both research and clinical practice.