Grammar and Intelligence

Blind Bandit said:
I can agree but its not the only complicated skill you can learn.

And lets be honest English is a butchered amalgamation of other languages.
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True, there are other skills, but you can't ignore grammar as being a skill. If grammar is your only skill, it is still a skill.

English: Proto-North-Germanic, Latin, Scandinavian, and French. The grammar is primarily Germanic, and contains several agglutinative properties, but recently has been SIMPLIFIED to be more analytic. As a language, we're dropping cases and tenses left and right. English is so difficult to learn, because what we do by agglutination and by syntax is incredibly random and nonsensical. (also, we have these really weird words like "strengths" CCCVCCC <-- damn thats a complicated sylable.)

Also, it is not butchered! it is very understandable why we adopted certain terms from where. our Swadesh list is proto-north-germanic. Our religious terms are latin. Place and name words scandanavian. authoritarian and cuisine words are french. Not that butchered at all!

*goes back to LINGUISTICS paper*
 
TheLastMohican said:
I used to think that people who used good grammar tended to have higher IQ's and vice versa. But then I discovered how wrong I was while reading IQ threads full of posts like the following:


Clearly the most intelligent people in the world can be found on gaming forums. The rest of us need to rethink our prejudices from the ground up.
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Think about online IQ tests. They are pattern recognition, word relationships and math.

What are MMOs? Pattern recognition, word relationships and math...

They study before the test man....
 
InTheWomblikeCocoon said:
Would you or would you not naturally deem an articulate speaker as having a higher level of intelligence than someone who spoke in incomplete sentences, or broken english? This then becomes the question of whether or not a person could be perceived as having greater intelligence because of their ability to utilize yes, formal grammar.
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This is a cultural bias. Your question is sincere and I understand what you want to know. It depends on the culture that the person grew up in. You cant say that someone has a language disability if it is a recognized patterns of speaking so to speak.


I would hesitate trying to put intelligence into a narrowly defined box. I had a horrible time with grammar when I was growing up. It did not make any sense to me. I know somewhat intelligent. Some people may also be learning English. I remember I was giving an assessment on science to 5 th grade students. I did not know the students. The child that had the least amount of English was the most creative and thoughtful about science. How did I know. I know from some of his behaviors. What he did and how he did it after the assessment. I would never have gotten that from a test or from his English.
 
Proper use of grammar, not so much, but vocabulary yes indeed.
 
There may be a loose correlation between one's grammar and intelligence. For example, stupid people are probably more likely to exhibit bad grammar than generally intelligent people. But, regardless of intelligence, poor grammar indicates sloppiness. I would never hire anyone whose resume had grammatical or spelling errors.

It has been said that if you can't write, you can't think and, if you can't think, you can't write. Good grammar is a requirement for clear and precise communication.
 
i like 2 spell gud
 
sookie said:
This is a cultural bias. Your question is sincere and I understand what you want to know. It depends on the culture that the person grew up in. You cant say that someone has a language disability if it is a recognized patterns of speaking so to speak.


I would hesitate trying to put intelligence into a narrowly defined box. I had a horrible time with grammar when I was growing up. It did not make any sense to me. I know somewhat intelligent. Some people may also be learning English. I remember I was giving an assessment on science to 5 th grade students. I did not know the students. The child that had the least amount of English was the most creative and thoughtful about science. How did I know. I know from some of his behaviors. What he did and how he did it after the assessment. I would never have gotten that from a test or from his English.
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Again, I said more likely. I am not dumb enough to assume grammar as the sole indicator of intelligence. Im thinking about this on a whole, and people keep giving me stories. And one of my other posts said to assume that the groups of people were American born citizens, ruling out other factors. I know this is such a relative question, so I narrowed down.
 
InTheWomblikeCocoon said:
Well general intelligence encompasses all of those things mentioned, at least in part. I do agree that grammar is a type of intelligence, but I was wondering if it could indicate general intelligence (the flawed concept of the popular view of intelligence). i hope no one thought i was trying to be politically correct, because IQ and all that hype is really just an aspect of popular psychology and is not very credible in the eyes of more serious psychologists and psychiatrists. So, let me restate this "as g is defined as general intelligence-the ability to learn relatively quickly; meaning in comparison to a majority of the population, ability to detect patterns, which we can all do, but on a spectrum would be specified as an extreme in significantly intelligent individuals. I recognize how easy it is to confuse correlation and causation...and though some of you have stated that you knew a couple of individuals who contradicted the statement (which in my opinion is true, that grammar and intelligence are positively correlated) I wonder if a group of 100 individuals who were exceptionally skilled in language, and one group of 100 individuals who were linguistically challenged (assuming they all speak the same language) and who were put in the same room with one another show a wide range of intelligence scores given any basic intelligence test (for g).
Which group do you believe would score higher?
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See the bold please
 
Poor grammar may be a result of a poor education, not necessarily low intelligence. Also, some people just don't care about grammar, and are deliberately sloppy with it. But I think there might be a general correlation between pattern recognition and intelligence.
 
Highly "intelligent" people score extremely well on general IQ tests
Most highly intelligent people also have better grammar than their counterparts. Are there exceptions to each? YES
Does this negate the majority? NO

iq-range-occupations.jpg
 
There is a correlation as in, that the more intelligent people are often better at grammar.
But you should not turn it around, that good grammar indicates intelligence, this is false.
Correlation does not prove causality.

Take dyslexia for example, I have it, I suck at grammar, but it has nothing to do with my intelligence.
I personally would not count ‘good grammar’ as an indication of intelligence.
 
InTheWomblikeCocoon said:
Is there a correlation? Can anyone here honestly say that proper use of grammar is indicative (either in part or completely) of the level of intelligence (or g, I know that intelligence is a broad term so I will limit the definition of it to a combination of the ability to learn relatively quickly, detect patterns, and solve relatively difficult problems, which are NOT limited to subject matter; i.e.not only math problems).
I am not talking about savantism, or genius, but g, the general intelligence factor.
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Proper language helps others understand you more and a wide range vocabulary makes you seem more intelligent.

Note the word seem, their are plenty of intelligent people who just don't have a good vocabulary.
 
Uhh perhaps intelligent people have a different appreciation for language than those of lower intelligence levels..

And perhaps this is because people with high intelligence usually enjoy reading and learning and by habit, expose themselves to proper grammar-- and they end up using it.

I heard about a study awhile back that said something about children who grow up in homes with many books (libraries or just tons of shelved books in the front room) score higher on IQ tests than children whose parents don't have books lying around everywhere.

Does that mean the presence of books in the house makes children intelligent? No, it's the fact that their parents probably enjoy reading and learning and therefore expose their children to more learning experiences and set the example of reading as a habit for these kids as they get older.

Do you know what I mean?
 
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alt ctrl del said:
Uhh perhaps intelligent people have a different appreciation for language than those of lower intelligence levels..

And perhaps this is because people with high intelligence usually enjoy reading and learning and by habit, expose themselves to proper grammar-- and they end up using it.

I heard about a study awhile back that said something about children who grow up in homes with many books (libraries or just tons of shelved books in the front room) score higher on IQ tests than children whose parents don't have books lying around everywhere.

Does that mean the presence of books in the house makes children intelligent? No, it's the fact that their parents probably enjoy reading and learning and therefore expose their children to more learning experiences and set the example of reading as a habit for these kids as they get older.

Do you know what I mean?
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Yes! CORRELATION! I never said caused
 
Moxie said:
I don't think so. I think good grammar just means that you have reasonable verbal intelligence. I've known some wickedly smart people that can't put a sentence together.
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Exactly. Verbal intelligence. I can type very clearly but if I try to talk as I type about anything philisophical or political with people who I'm not that familiar with, social inhibitions come into play and I muddle things up or simply forget the point I was gonna make.

I don't think grammar reflects intelligence, I think how obviously bored or disinterested in certain subjects people are is more of a pointer.

What sith said about vocab I second too.
 
Some of the most intelligent people I've ever known have been horrible at spelling and absolutely incapable of correctly utilizing commas. My best friend is this way, and yet she made 100s on nearly every geometry, trigonometry, and calculus test she took in high school.

I think more intelligent people are more likely to pick up on and understand the subtleties of grammatical rules (seeing as they do seem to learn more quickly than "average" people), and within that group, people who read more will be exposed to proper grammatical usage more frequently and will have more opportunities to pick up on those subtleties.

On the other hand, some people just don't care, and my best friend is one of those people. Her interests lie far away from breaking up conjunctions, so it's just not something she thinks about. She'll talk my ear off on the phone or in person, and if I write on her Facebook wall, her reponses will be consistently concise.
 
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No, it just means you, for whatever reason, internalized the rules of the written standard of your language. I switch back and forth between formal and informal speech (double negatives, ain't, etc.) all the time.

From an objective linguistic sense a native speaker of a language by definition never uses "bad grammar", it's just that the person doesn't always speak in the standard formal register. Things like "ain't" and double negatives are perfectly grammatical according to the grammatical rules of SPOKEN English, which is not the same thing as the written standard.
 
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