Is vocabulary an indicator of intelligence?
Is vocabulary an indicator of intelligence?
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Transcript:
Hello. I'm Julian Northbrook from https://doingenglish.com. Is vocabulary an indicator of intelligence? Good question. Generally speaking yes, but at the same time, no, not really. Well, it's a good indicator of education, which of course goes hand-in-hand with intelligence. Intelligent people tend to read more, and because they read more, naturally, they are going to know more words, more vocabulary, and they're going to be more intelligent because they learn a lot from reading. Makes sense.
The thing is though, when it comes to speaking or writing, especially in a second language, when it comes to speaking or writing, what's really important is how succinctly and how clearly you express yourself. Now, a big mistake a lot of people make, native speakers included, by the way, is thinking that big, clever-sounding woods are intrinsically more intelligent sounding and they're not. Not necessarily.
A sure-fire way to make yourself look pretty stupid is by using, overusing big, complex, intelligent-sounding words in language where it isn't appropriate, or worse in a totally incorrect way.
Let's walk. This is supposed to be walking with Julian, after all.
I've talked about this guy and his research a lot in my videos and in my daily emails, doingenglish.com if you want to get my daily English learning tips. But there's a guy called Daniel Oppenheimer, and he's a professor at the University of Princeton. And he did a lot of research that found that the most intelligent sounding essays, and that's how he did a lot of his research, were actually the ones that used simple vocabulary because it showed confidence and it made the good ideas, the intelligent-sounding ideas, stand out.
The people who tried to use clever words in order to make their work, their essays, their writing sound intelligent, on the other hand, really just confused their reader. And often it seemed like these people were actually trying to hide the fact that they actually had nothing interesting or intelligent to say.
So the answer to the question, is vocabulary an indicator of intelligence, really is yes and no. While it is true that intelligent people do tend to have better vocabularies, what you've got to understand is that causation... Or rather, I should say, I've almost got that wrong. What you've got to understand is that correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation.
And again, it's more about how well you communicate concepts, ideas, in a concise, succinct way that speaks to the person that you're speaking to. And sometimes yes, it is going to be more appropriate to use complex technical language, but often it's not. And the sign of a true advanced speaker or writer is somebody who is able to be flexible and is able to judge the person that they are communicating to and communicate to them in the most appropriate way.
Right. That's all I've got for this video. If you want my daily email tips for speaking better English, head over to https://doingenglish.com, and there are multiple places on there to sign up. When you do sign up, I'm also going to give you my free rocket launch method of training, which is going to teach you the five key changes that you need to make to see real progress with your English learning.
Right, this is me, Julian Northbrook, signing out from another video. See you soon guys. Bye-bye.
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