Date:  Wed, 6 Dec 1995 08:14:58 -0500

From:  "Dennis R. Preston" <preston[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]PILOT.MSU.EDU>

Subject: Re: Language and Intelligence



Rudy,

I ran my fingers before I read your contribhution. You have said much

better what I tried to get at. It clearly ain't at vocabulary.

Dennis



>    We Texans likewise have to concentrate on hearing a really heavy,

>thick Northern Cities accent -- if it's even comprehensible, e.g. bag:beg.

>Vocabulary size is a reliable measure of language development in children,

>but it is historically characteristic of reductionist thinking in psychology

>to equate vocabulary with intelligence. It is a good indicator of size of

>vocabulary, which is presumably an index of knowledge of language and of

>cultural knowledge as indexed by vocabulary, at least in certain domains.

>But there is a clear circularity there, and to make it indicative of

>intelligence, unless one is very restrictive in identifying this "intelligence"

>as tautologically equivalent to knowledge of language, is an unwarranted leap.

>    Happily, many in psychology have moved beyond this misidentification

>to recognize a number of different types of "intelligence", not all of which

>(indeed most) are indexed by linguistic (i.e., vocabulary) knowledge.

>    Even within the realm traditionally considered "intelligence", there

>are clearly differential abilities to think/conceptualize/comprehend abstract

>matters. Mathematicians and physicists belong at the top of this pile,

>with linguists somewhat below, and historians and archeologists somewhere

>below that. However, a historian may have a larger vocabulary than a linguist,

>and both have larger vocabularies than a mathematician. This is not to suggest

>that the relationship is an inverse one, just that there is no necessary

>relationship.

>    --Rudy Troike (rtroike[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ccit.arizona.edu)