Do Languages Influence Intelligence?

What about people whose thoughts are not verbal, but spatial? Who think in pictures?
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
But I'm convinced that the activities and interests that fill the lives of the vast majority of people in the 21st century can only be effectively managed mentally by using words. How would you plan a day of bookkeeping, selling shoes, chasing criminals, programming computers, or even cooking a meal or bulldozing a building site, except in thoughts that are mostly composed of words? Every visual image of a Ferragamo shoe or a plate full of basic food groups is supported by copious verbal description in order to make it something more than a daydream.

Even raising children and farming have become word-intensive occupations in our era.
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I really enjoy reading your posts: they are most informative, highly intellectual, and often very insightful.

I think sometimes we don't think in words but often drift off into uncollected mood changes that then affect our way of thinking. I'm only adding this in to emphasize how words are not the only influence in our thought processes that influences our intelligence. Mood swings, behavior, genetics, ingrained dispositions, upbringing, social surroundings, peers, environmental influences all contribute; but I do believe that the complexity of a given language has a profound influence on the construction of our neural network and our consequent analytical and communicative processes.
 
fraggle said:
But I'm convinced that the activities and interests that fill the lives of the vast majority of people in the 21st century can only be effectively managed mentally by using words.
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I would speculate in the opposite direction, based on the observation that people have smaller vocabularies and worse language skills now than in the recent past, and that few of the people actually managing these modern lives can explain, or even describe, what they are doing, in language.

We seem to be operating more and more visually, less and less linguistically, as modernization happens.

And I can pretty much guarantee you that the guy running the bulldozer is not thinking his job through in words, any more than most of the people cooking in restaurants or programming computers or repairing machines or framing houses are. Few people can tell you what they are doing, in any manner coherent enough to actually manage the doing of it.

Illustration: Some guy once noticed that a lot of people think the moonwalking astronauts stayed on the surface - instead of floating around, as everything else does in space - because they were wearing "heavy boots".

How did they get this impression? Not from the words, which would specifically have mentioned "gravitational attraction" and "less gravity" or something like that. My explanation is that the pictures show them walking around in a manner which would on Earth would mean they were wearing heavy boots. The visual impression trumped the informational content of language.
 
samcdkey said:
Architects, design engineers.
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And artists too. A dark private facet of language, I would think, proving that non-verbal communication can be had properly on paper.

iceaura said:
I would speculate in the opposite direction, based on the observation that people have smaller vocabularies and worse language skills now than in the recent past, and that few of the people actually managing these modern lives can explain, or even describe, what they are doing, in language.

We seem to be operating more and more visually, less and less linguistically, as modernization happens.
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And yet again, in a different opposite direction—bureaucrats.

I think administration, management, officers and other such bureaucrats are tediously chained to the printed word verbatim, with hardly any attestation or exposure to raw human culture, hence blind to natural human phenomena: confronted with a natural situation outside their field, such as acknowledging the intricacies of an unconventional psychological occurrence in need of sensitive articulation, they will inevitably just… skip it, let alone try to penetrate it. Yet, these very same well-paid people stand between a natural flow of the human process and the corridors of social power and policy—they can curb and render void without second thought an individual's natural rights: they are exceptionally good at deleting identity. One has to literally maneuver around them just to breath easier.
 
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Wasn't it proved that being brought up with two languages makes you more intelligent?

I was brought up with two first languages; I still get them confused a bit, but I can think in both and communicate in both without concentrating.
 
Language is infact intelligence, so it definately influences intellect. e,g mathematics, computer languages.
 
Yes, language definitely solidifies the thought pattern processes that you use in your brain, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that one who grows up in a language is any more intelligent than one who uses spatial patterns in cognition. Off the subject a bit, I just read an article that states that a person's IQ is pretty much set for life by the age of five.
 
That article is probably BS. The brain hasn't even finished developing by age 5, and developmental psychology I've read has said nothing of the sort. Mind supplying it to the rest of us?
 
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