Ch. 9 ~ Intelligence & Language

How do we define and measure intelligence?

• comparing humans to other humans and to other animals

Who invented the thought of family trees through genetics?

• Francis Galton

• He also was interested in anthropometrics meaning he believed it could be define and measure

• Measured the trees of families around him based on success

What was Alfred Binet’s definition of Binet?

• the ability to think, understand, reason, and adapt to changes

What was Alfred Binet’s goal in his study?

• to identify those students who performed well below the norm

• Looked into special education and applying his belief through school settings

What is the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test?

• “mental” age compared to others in the same age group across the population

• measures IQ (score)

• Standardize

• **It couldn’t include other languages and cultures so it limited smart people from other countries

What was factor analysis?

• by Spearman’s G factor and examined correlations among intelligence test items

What was the Spearman’s G Factor made up of?

• general intelligence

• math

• writing

• problem solving

• drawing

What was the G factor?

• a summary of what Spearman thought

• the G stands for general intelligence as he thought most test items clustered in one

What was the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)?

• includes different types of performance scores such as logical reasoning and spatial scores

• valid across languages and cultures

What are savants?

• have impaired intellectual ability in most areas but show exceptional ability in others

*so what is the real definition of intelligence?

What was Howard Gardener’s Multiple intelligence thought?

• thinks of the intelligences as skills and talents

• includes those who are weak in one part and smart in another

What was the problem with Gardner’s thoughts?

• not easily tested, not a lot of empirical support

What was the Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory?

• based on the idea that intelligence is not JUST measured by academic performance

  • he included analytical intelligence and called it book smarts

  • Practical; they draw from experience, can adapt to diff situations (street smarts)

  • Creative; they see things from a unique perspective

What is fluid Intelligence?

• ability to think on the moment + attention span

• taking in a lot of info on the spot, analyze and come up with solutions

• e.g.

  • escape room

What are two examples of how fluid intelligence is integrated in tests?

• The LSAT

• The GREP

What is crystallized intelligence?

• knowledge they already know they they draw on

• All the knowledge someone has accumulated

• Gets higher with age, but fluid goes down with age

How does genetic factors play a part?

• intelligence is difficult to determine but it’s believed that it is connected and highly dependent

• Done so by twin studies

  • identical twins grown apart still show a high correlation

How do environmental factors play in intelligence?

• prenatal; the lower weight the less IQ later on in life

• Income level

• Social Class

• Family stability

What are the three properties that language systems include?

• Symbolic; can be broken down into individual symbols, sounds, letters…

• Generative; from a limited number of symbols (alphabet) there are an unlimited number of ideas, sentences, words can be generated

• Structured; needs to follow rules, letters can’t just be randomly placed neither can words in a sentence, all members that speak language must follow the rules

What are phonemes?

• the individual letter sounds of a language; also connected letters like CH, TH

• determined by movements of the articulators

What is speech production?

• most complex motor activity that humans do because of how much control we have of it

• requires precise manipulation of vocal tract

What is place of articulation?

• part of vocal tract where the sound is emitted

• Sometimes at front (pah)

• or at the back “hey”

What is manner of articulation

• relates to how you’re producing the sound

  • with “pah” you place lips together

  • with “hey” its from the back of your throat

What are some examples of articulators in our speech?

• Lips

• Tongue

• Teeth

What are pragmatics?

• the unwritten rules of a language

• “Command ground” rules that everyone knows

• e.g

  • Speaking distance

  • Backchannels: nodding, smiling, to encourage speaker to continue

  • Turn-taking in who talks when, encouraged by eye contact

What is prosodic bootstrapping?

• attention to rhythms of sounds and language by listening to those around them

How do infants begin experimenting with language?

• babbling during the first 6 months

What is lexical bootstrapping?

• how language develops in children when they are older such as 1 or 2

• They can infer meaning and structure to meaning of words they hear, can start saying some words

What two areas of the brain are associated with langauge?

• Broca’s; on boundary of frontal and temporal lobe, has a lot of dense connections with Wernicke’s

  • production of speech

• Wernicke’s

What is Broca’s Aphasia vs Wernicke’s Aphasia deficiencies?

• Broca’s = words on tip of tongue but they just cannot produce the language, deficit of speech production

• Wernicke’s = deficit of language comprehension

  • rare, results in a person being unable to understand what someone is saying to them and even what they are saying themselves

*these are only on the left hemisphere

Who was viki?

• an ape they experimented with

• attempted to teach her to speak

Why did research in apes switch to sign language and with who?

• because they realized that the vocal tract wasn’t very flexible

• they attempted with Washoe an ape and Koko a gorilla

What was cross-fostering?

• animals lived among humans who were immersed in sign language

What could Kanzi the Bonobos do?

• identify hundreds of symbols using a lexigram

• can map individual words to specific symbols

What was concluded about communication in apes?

• Could learn individual signs and a wide range of gestures but couldn’t grasp the concept of language to string many words and concepts together

What is the uniqueness about languages and dialects?

• distinction between both are based on political boundaries

• related languages exist on a continuum referred to as Flemish dialect: communicating with someone from a diff community using similar dialects

What is mutual intelligibility?

• the degree to which two speakers of either two diff languages or dialects can understand each other

What is balanced vs unbalanced bilingualism?

• they are equally proficient in all the languages they can speak in

• *bilinguals are unbalanced and have one they use more often

What is a Lingua Franca?

• in an area where different people live, they make one language to be the common one amongst them; for example in Singapore, it’s English

What is the heritage language?

• Language in their home country

What is the societal language?

• the language they’ll be using by the majority of the people in the area the immigrants will be moving to

What is codeswitching?

• conducted during the second generation, switching between the two languages in an attempt to be understood

How can vocabulary size be measured?

• Semantic Categorization Task

  • e.g name as many pieces of furniture that you can

• Results show that people who are bilingual have smaller vocabulary sizes in each of the languages they speak than a comparable monolingual does in their main language

*these differences are very difficult to detect in everyday communication

What is metalinguistic Awareness?

• means that people who are bilingual have a greater understanding of how language format works

• this enables them to be better communicators and make themselves understood in other countries

How does bilingualism enable people to have better executive control?

• because they develop selective attention and multitasking between interpreting and finding which words are best to use

What is an orthography?

• the set of rules for writing the words of a language

  • mapping of the symbols to the sounds that they use

  • Can be shallow (transparent) or deep

What does it mean by orthography being deep?

• the letters and letter combinations produce different phonemes depending on the context

  • such as the suffix '“ed” in the ending of some words in English; waded, jogged, shopped

*hard to pick up as a second language

What does reading require?

• a fast conversion of visual symbols to sound and meaning

What is developmental dyslexia?

• diagnosed in childhood

• reading and spelling difficulties

What is phonological dyslexia?

• an inability to sound out diff letter combinations

What is surface dyslexia?

• can sound out the letters and combinations but can’t recognize the overall word easily

• read slower because they’re sounding out the individual letters as opposed to recognizing the words outright

Which languages are dyslexia present?

• in every single one

• but its prevalence depends on the orthography