I suspect the trend is due to less face to face social interaction, especially fewer conversations. When we converse with other people face to face, their expressions give us additional clues to their intent, which helps boost our learning rate of vocabulary and expression skills.<p>If you were to have digital natives write the tests instead of those of us from before the internet, they results would likely be inverted. There has been a permanent (unless the net goes away) shift in the way people receive information and store it, there is no need to have long term storage of facts in one's head... google is always there.<p>There was an interesting comment on /. years ago I can still recall... but young people would have to have it stored in a personal information store to be able to do the same thing.<p>It took me WEEKS to find it again, even with strong google-fu... but the kid with the PIM would have it (unless of course it got censored into the memory hole).<p>IQ tests don't measure IQ, they are a reductionist fantasy.