Cainntear wrote:reineke wrote:Similarly in regard to psychopaths, the mere fact that they do not endorse the “correct” answers on EI tests does not mean they lack some form of “intelligence” required to understand emotions, because the test itself is not a measure of intelligence (Locke, 2005) but one of conformity to social norms. By definition, psychopaths disregard social norms, so the test does not seem to tell us anything we do not already know..."
Thanks, that's a really useful link... in that McGreal says what I was thinking better than I could have.
"
Hence, if you pick the answer that most people agree with you may be considered “emotionally intelligent”. This is in striking contrast to tests of general intelligence where highly intelligent people can produce correct answers to difficult questions where most people cannot (Brody, 2004)."
In fact, one of Gardner's motivations for multiple intelligence theory was the existence of
savants, people with serious mental disorders that showed extreme ability in a narrow set of skills (think
Rain Man, or
this severely disabled pianist). When we exclude psychopaths from EI we basically remove the EI equivalent of savants, making it fundamentally different from any other proposed "intelligence".
McGreal's article is entitled "Emotional Intelligence Not Relevant to Psychopaths". If I take a look at expert descriptions of this issue I run into these kinds of statements:
"Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by
a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness."
"Psychopaths are characterized by a general lack of empathy and attenuated responding to emotional stimuli".
"Psychopathy is a personality disorder associated with a profound lack of empathy..."
"...it is well established that individuals with psychopathy have a marked deficit in affective arousal, emotional empathy, and caring for the well-being of others..."
"Empathy, the social-emotional response that is induced by the perception of another person's affective state, is a fundamental component of emotional experience, and plays a vital role in social interaction...Empathy includes both cognitive and affective components."
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00489/fullhttp://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/136/8/2550None of these statements work well within your psychopath theory. If you wish to pick at the Multiple Intelligence theory, I have offered you a couple of better articles earlier in the thread including one by McGreal himself.
Cainntear wrote:rdearman wrote:Smallwhite is correct, my question is, all other factors being equal will a more intelligent person have better pronunciation?
Probably.
As has been said, intelligent people are more likely to spot that there's a problem and determine a path to a solution.
But there's one variable that outperforms intelligence: teaching. In my opinion, intelligence (if defined as a spectrum for humans without a specific neurological or psychological ) is only really important for learning when the teaching is not optimised. Intelligence is what we use to fill in the gaps in what we've been told.
A theoretical wonder-course would reduce the impact of intelligence massively. Right now, pronunciation is one of the most under-taught language skills there is. It is an article of faith for many teachers that pronunciation "will take care of itself", so it isn't taught, and people have to go out of their way to learn it.
All other factors being equal and looking at intelligence in a holistic manner, a person with lower overall intelligence could seriously outperform a highly intelligent person if he or she is gifted in capacities associated with language acquisition. Earlier I cited the case of "CJ". He was a native English speaker from a monolingual home.
"From the age of 15 (past the onset of puberty), he had studied the following languages in succession: French, German, Spanish, Latin, Moroccan Arabic, and Italian, some of which he learned at school in the United States, and others he "picked up" quickly abroad.The native speakers of languages CJ spoke judged his ability, including his pronunciation, as native-like...
The battery of psychological tests CJ was given revealed that his musical and visuospatial aptitudes were only average... his IQ - including verbal IQ was normal, and his language aptitude as judged by the MLAT was average on most sections. However, on the IQ test CJ did particularly well on the vocabulary and code-learning and retention subtests. He also obtained superior scores on cognitive subtests related to pattern matching and decoding. Finally, on the MLAT, he again excelled on subtests related to learning new codes, and also did well on guessing a word when only a consonant was given. His verbal memory (but not other types of memory) was outstanding and thought to be closely linked to his highly successful L2 learning profile."
Case Study Research in Applied Linguistics
By Patricia Duff
According to Teepen (2004) "the tests showed that he does not use words in a very abstract or sophisticated way. Proverbs proved difficult for him interpret. He also displayed a relatively poor performance on visual-spatial tasks. It might then be accurate to claim that CJ is highly intelligent in areas that pertain to second language acquisition, but only average or below average in other areas."
Regarding language teaching and general intelligence, here's where this type of theorizing and problem-solving may lead:
Second Language Acquisition and General Intelligence
"This paper will address the continuing failure of foreign language teaching to achieve its apparent purposes. It will discuss the viability of teaching foreign languages in an academic setting to all members of the student population. It will argue that the standard IQ test, which measures general intelligence, has overall predictive validity for academic and other kinds of success. It will argue that there is a degree of linkage between general intelligence (the ‘g’ factor) and first language learning and a much larger connection between ‘g’ and second language acquisition, particularly in a foreign language environment, and that these connections have largely been ignored for reasons of political philosophy, even though the ‘g’ factor is as important a problem for language learning as for mathematics and physics."
"In a nutshell, classroom based learning of a second language requires sensitivity to rules, processing speed and considerable powers of memorization in the area of verbal skills. It makes demands that can only be met by those with higher than average levels of ‘academic’ power, in other words of the intelligence that IQ tests aim to measure."
"IQ tests should be implemented at the pre-junior high school stage in order to select pupils who will potentially benefit from classroom based language education."
"There is no real need for the majority of the population of a large country like Japan to acquire competence in a foreign language, anymore than there is for them all to become concert pianists."
http://jairo.nii.ac.jp/0337/00000115/en