IQ needed to be a hyperglot (Polyglots) Language Learning Forum

IQ needed to be a hyperglot
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Language Learning Forum : Polyglots

164 messages over 21 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 3 ... 20 21 Next >>

sigiloso
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Message 17 of 164

22 June 2006 at 5:46am | IP Logged

I see a new thread has been opened insisting on the question of what a model explaining polyglottery would be and the recurring question of the balance of factors in the model, so I though I could add some asked replies to this now old thread about which, btw, was very ashamed for how clumsy and typo-enriched it went through; I was quite self-medicated that day and did it just for kicks, honestly. Now that I know the forum better I take it very seriously since it has lead to crucial decisions on my list of languages and a lot of insight from certain seniour members. Thank all anyway for everything.

vinz wrote:

I found your post very unfounded and just lacking logical flow.

True. It is really an impresionistic thing I wanted to share with you derived from other enquiries I have regarding IQ-top chess, IQ-sensitivity, IQ-everything. You just come to a point you start to smell the truth, ; I am not aware of any study exploring a possible connection IQ-extreme polyglottery, if someone know please let us know.

vinz wrote:

Your point is that cognitive abilities have to do with how many languages and what kind of proficiency a learner can attain. I don't think you can think in a linear fashion just like you described it. There are many more factors which have to be taken into account for each learner in each language.

True. I didn't mean to put forward a full model. Certainly would be a curious model in that most factors appear to be sine qua non. I was just suggesting: what if the core factor is pure and simple "g"?

vinz wrote:

I am speaking from an anthropologist's point of view. Environmental cues and stimuli account a lot for a leaner in addition to his 'innate intelligence'. I don't think the IQ of a person is fixed and determined genetically. To me, while it does have genetic basis, the expression of the 'intelligence factor' is majorly varied by the environment in which one grows up. There are experiments with identical twins being separated at birth and raised in different environments. While they have all of their genetic material in common, this does not imply that both twins will be exactly the same once they grow up..

Oh no, the prehistoric genes/environment thing again. The scientific stuff on it is endless, and seem to point to both has a part, but genetic is much greater. It surprise you mention twins studies. Most of them were a shock for the enviromentalist supporters.

S

vinz wrote:

econdly, does a learner like Ziad or Mezzofanti speak exactly like a native from the target language's country? No. From the moment they speak you can tell they are not from there. There are always clues that give them away. Accent, strange idioms, bizarre tense uses. I spoke to Ziad many times in French. He has a slight accent and strange idiom uses. I am not taking away credit from him in any way, but merely pointing out that one can never pass for native. According to your theory, an extension of consequences of cognitive abilities would be the ability to pass for native speaker. After all, if language learning was only determined by pure cognitive abilities, then so must be the accent, idiomatic usage, sentence pacing, etc... However, a high level of literary mastery in the language does not necessarily imply a high level of spoken abilities...

What? I never mentioned native-like abilities. Anyway, this is another constantly recurring topic, concomitant with the already discussed elsewhere critical period rubbish etc. This could take pages, but if you care about my unfounded opinion, foreign languages have a different life of native languages, anyone failing to understand this is in for constant frustration and stress; there is a critical period, but only in the phonological front; a door is closed, but it can be opened again with special techniques; it is all a mirage coming from speech organs going too stiff about certain ways.

Sorry I have to go quick, I ll be back soon with replies for every post.
Finally, some statements seemed random and unfounded, especially this one at the end: "the white race excell in verbal intelligence".

And what do you refer to as "g"?

vinz.

PS: Your post contains many spelling mistakes that you could correct as well. Is this a direct expression of your IQ? I think not.[/QUOTE]
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sigiloso
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Message 18 of 164

22 June 2006 at 8:36am | IP Logged

CaitO'Ceallaigh wrote:

sigiloso wrote:

One more thing: given that white males individuals have the highest degree of variation, and that the white race excell in verbal intelligence, the list of past and living hyperglots are further explained.

So I take it you've never been to Cura�ao.

What is it that makes one a hyperglot? That he speaks several languages or that he boasts about it?

I feel I have caused here the "cognitive uncomfortableness" I was fearing to cause, because of the gender remark. What is has been known for a long time is that women have narrower distribution of intelligence (though disturbing latest Lynch high scale study pointing to a certain neat difference too), that is, they are less present bottom and up, that is to say, e.g. special education programs for both mental retardation and giftedness populated by boys. Sorry will be back later, gonna post till here cause I cannot store im in a public library.
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sigiloso
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Message 19 of 164

22 June 2006 at 8:37am | IP Logged

/Finally, some statements seemed random and unfounded, especially this one at the end: "the white race excell in verbal intelligence/

It is a field called psychology of individual differences, and started eons ago when different performance in Iq tests by different groups were noticed. Evidence is overwhelming. For me, it is worthy to have the information for toy speculations such as if the spatial intelligence penchant in Asians has to do with their writing systems etc.

/And what do you refer to as "g"? /

Im not the one to explain anything, but when all started it was noted that individuals who perform well in a given task tended to perform equally well in any other, so a general factor of intelligence was proposed. So it is a scientific construct, which biological basis is still a matter of speculation I think but I am not sure. There are correlations with brain size, reaction time, things like that.

PS: Your post contains many spelling mistakes that you could correct as well. Is this a direct expression of your IQ? I think not.[/QUOTE]
I think yes. I do not fare exceedingly well in Iq tests. Seriously, in forums style is very careless, I was trying to imitate it.

Magnum wrote:

I'll chime in with my two cents...
IQ is irrelevant. Life it to be lived and enjoyed, and a number is meaningless.

I agree. Take a number: 210. Means nothing. Now suppose it is cms, that is 2,10 m, say more than 99th percentile of human height in the normal distribution of height of a sample of humans. Still meaningless. But suppose we are discussing top performance in top basket, then it is not meaningless, more if we mention neurophisiological response or jumping ability or whatever, I dont know. I meant to discuss top performance in extreme polyglottery here. IQ is really nothing more than a statistical expression of where an individual stands in a normal distribution of a population. (I hope no blunders here, I am not a science man).

Magnum wrote:

Your theory does not take into account so many variables.

True, you do it in the other threads.

arnz wrote:

My cousin is developmentally disabled...although his topics are usually of a childlike nature

Exactly what I said, thank you for the confirmation

frenkeld wrote:

Dreaded? Naa - the forum has generally attracted high-IQ individuals, so all an IQ-based second language acquisition theory can do is stoke the egos of the participants.
The fact that some are born with the potential to be very smart and some with only average innate abilities is common-sense self-evident.
Language, properly defined, is a medium of thought, and there is indeed no reason to expect that one's mental powers would be revealed to be substantially different when expressed in a foreign language than in one's own. This is also completely self-evident.
So, we have several self-evident statements. What, then, is the punchline? That some are better at picking up languages than others, given the same motivation level and the same learning opportunities and tools? Was this ever seriously in doubt?

Great, I find it self-evident too. For some reason, not everybody see it like us. If they can't, they go to a forum and say, "you" cannot (who, me?, talk for yourself, man). People like Richard Lynn has endured a lot of harassment for working in this area. Journalists touching on this is just a joke, not only a lie, right the opposite of the state of the art in the field. It is an endless matter really, specially in usa. More on why I posted later.

rafaelrbp wrote:

Based on the title, I think his reasoning is more about the IQ needed to be a hyperpolyglot. And I can't really tell which cognitive ability or feat is the most important for language learning, but surely the hyperpolyglots (+10 languages) have something that the others don't, or at least something much more developed.

Really some of you should read what the establishment say on language adquisition. I started when a student and drop it quick so dull and unspiring it was. Besides, they write as if they are not polyglots themselves, so I fear a cognitive distortion phenomenon takes place. I'd rather read this forum ;) But what I was suggesting here informally to you friends is that what if not a specifical faculty is coming into play and just plain "g" accounts for most of the cognitive processes involved in language learning?. What your tasks are? MIne are analogies drawing, generalizing, syntactic processing, mnemonic tricks building for associating words, this kind of stuff, metaphoric understanding of space into time into idiomatic expressions. Not difficult but plain intellectual work.

Magnum wrote:

There are many kinds of savants that are developmentally retarded. It is too easy to try and correlate one statistic to a trait, and claim causality. For all we know, IQ could have nothing to do with language learning. Maybe it is more of a right brain / left brain question? Maybe it has to do with the kinds of experiances a young child has- is one child exposed to more sounds whereas another is not? I'll give an example. I know a guy who spent $2000 on a stereo system. He is not rich, it took him a long time to save. When he got it, he put in a CD and said "Can you hear how much clearer the music is". I could not tell the difference between it and a $100 stereo. Yet to him, it was like day and night. Since he has a better ear, would that make it easier for him to learn Mandarin?

Causality is traced down by means of "controlling for", as they say. Believe me, is scientific method. Now will come those who don't believe in scientific method, which will lead us to phylosophy of science. Too much for me:)
About the myth of ear, puff, maybe I open a thread on it someday. A linguist said: " The perception of a sound is posterior to the ability to produce it" This statement changed my life, really. More on this later, as more friends insisted on it.

frenkeld wrote:

Some IQ-related self-selection unrelated to the language-learning abilities may take place of course - multiple language-learning is a pretty nerdy activity, and folks who are just happy to live their lives may never develop an interest in it regardless of their language-learning abilities. Also, the vast majority of language-learning materials are written in a way that will fry the brain of anyone not used to slogging through fairly technical explanations, so we may lose some potential "low-IQ" linguistic talent due to that as well.

In fact, sigiloso's idea was not entirely confined to the IQ score, but placed extra emphasis on the verbal skills in one's native language. This correlation is also not implausible, but the tests one takes in one's native language typically look at one's knowledge of the more learned vocabulary and the ability to decipher messy syntax.

Ha, ha, you'are in the spirit. Look at the apparently silly test of repeating a string of digits, who supposedly evaluates working memory. Now, it takes time to understand, but it does have to do with intelligence in every field. Sometimes when your tackling a purely intellectual problem you feel your reasoning in a point crumbles down, but it is not your reasoning, it is your working memory which was saturated. Look at the speed reading story: I bet low IQ individuals read slowly with or without courses, cause when confronted with convoluted syntax, their working memory actually crumbles down. Now, we all know that things like Arabic grammar of German book writing style is in fact convoluted. Low IQ individuals are off.

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sigiloso
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Message 20 of 164

22 June 2006 at 9:13am | IP Logged

sigiloso wrote:

Im back sorry what a mess I m doing of this. So, they will tell you that there's an international conspiracy preventing women to take part in top chess competitions... sorry don't buy, or top mathematical contest, or anything bad or good which is extreme, buddhism, suicide, autism, greatest intellectual achievements...just look that anything extreme is heavily male, and was pointing to the apparent fact that extreme polyglottery follows the rule. Naturally, mild polyglottery which is what most of us is after have normally represented or even overrepresented females. In fact, there's has been talking on autistic/empathic brain. I believe high intellectual achivements have to do with a bit of anecdotal mild autism, that is, keeping concentraded for a long time, years, on something. This is very male. What we enjoj of the chess club is two hours of silence and not thinking of anything else at all. No girls there. Why should be this a scientific taboo?
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CaitO'Ceallaigh
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Message 21 of 164

22 June 2006 at 9:35am | IP Logged

This thread is getting very weird.
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lady_skywalker
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Message 22 of 164

22 June 2006 at 9:39am | IP Logged

I'm lost...what does chess have to do with hyperglots??

Don't want to sound too harsh but I couldn't make that much sense out of your last two posts, Sigiloso. :s
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patuco
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Message 23 of 164

22 June 2006 at 9:40am | IP Logged

I agree with both of you. Aren't we supposed to be discussing languages and how to learn them? This is more like the Twilight Zone.

Edited by patuco on 22 June 2006 at 9:41am
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sigiloso
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Message 24 of 164

22 June 2006 at 11:29am | IP Logged

You are absolutely right: I beg your pardon. I am awfully sorry. What happened is that the part dealing with gender differences was disjointed into two posts. I was suggesting too some autistic nature of high intellectual achievement (I understand speaking 30-40 languages is a high intellectual achievement) without the subject being technically autistic, conecting so the three topics giftedness/autism/male brain v.female brain. I was planning to talk about a lot of more maybe obscure ideas, psychological traits of profoundly gifted people as from the Terman study, to support my central point, debunking the ear myth, etc. But I made a mess of it. Slept little last night, forgive me. I would be happy if the administrator closes down or even better erases this abortion of a thread, the silliest ever posted in the forum probably.

Just my before dying words:
Perhaps what I was secretly conveying is: let's all get free of unnecesary psychological limitations. For example, if you dont know French, people will tell you that you cannot read French books, but this is not true, and I am angry with myself for having lost so much relevant information. The truth is if you speak another latin language or European language maybe, you can get reading proficiency in French in a couple of hours. All you have to do is look some odd words up from the first page. I am starting to feel latin languages just as plain dialects of the same thing. Why shouldn't happen the same in the future with the whole Germanic and slavonic families? That's what this forum has given me. That means around 40 languages. I believe most of you have the potential to speak them and read some more, because you are here and people self-select themselves cognitively, the problem is you don't believe it. I was unconsciously trying to scare off prospective nosers-into killjoys with a message against their psychological limitations venom: maybe it is all that you are just a little thick.

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