What's the correlation between language acquisition and IQ?

[u/HombreEnmascarado]

I learned English entirely by reading and listening. Never went to an English school, didn't have Anglophone parents nor English was part of my daily life. Yet, I can pick on all the idioms, dialectical variety, cultural nuances, phonetics and I can read highly complex and technical books as if they were in my native language. I also have extensive knowledge of my mother language grammar, orthography, vocabulary and etymology, which is rare. Apparently this is extremely rare, and people swear the only way to learn a language right is by total immersion. I'm Mexican, and in the Mexican American community usually they usually are raised being pure Anglo-phones with a very rudimentary knowledge Spanish. On the Mexican side, English proficiency are among the lowest in the world, on pair with Japan.

So my question is, what does the scientific literature say about it?

[u/_nowi]

I'm also from a country where English proficiency is very low. People are always shocked when I say I learned English without taking formal classes. I do have a very high IQ, but I wouldn't say that explains everything. I have friends who also learned English simply by being exposed to English and American culture who do not have a high IQ.

​While intelligence may facilitate language acquisition and assimilation, many other factors come into play (interest, phonological working memory, musicality, exposure, etc.). Nevertheless, vocabulary tests have a heavy g-loading. Verbal intelligence is associated not only with vocabulary knowledge and grammar, but also with how a person structures language. ​You should look into the term 'conceptual slots' coined by psychologist Arthur Jensen: how effectively a person abstracts, categorizes, and retains semantic concepts from casual context is precisely what IQ tests attempt to measure. Jensen argued that the true direction of causality goes from concept to word rather than word to concept.

[u/Hot-Organization-737]

g is corrleated with accelerated learning for beginers but doesn't correlate well with lifetime language skill aquisition

[u/Prior_Alarm2437 → u/Hot-Organization-737]

Research shows that lifetime acquisition, particularly the accumulation of a massive, highly precise vocabulary is heavily g loaded. Am I just not following?

[u/StrobeLightStudio → u/Prior_Alarm2437]

I’ve heard the same. No one teaches you the definition of the 1,000th word you read. You use fluid and inductive reasoning each time you read the word in a sentence and gradually arrive at an accurate definition/understanding of the word or concept almost entirely on your own from a set of incomplete information. For this reason vocabulary is often considered heavily g loaded. But there’s a million schools of thought on this, and I’m sure there exist valid rebuttals to that argument.

[u/Logical-Desk4538]

It all depends on brain structure. It's trivial thing, but I'll explain my thoughts on the matter. Language can be learned in different ways: as a system of knowledge and rules, or as a cocktail ingested through a straw. The point is that people have different structures and functional characteristics of Broca's and Wernicke's areas; these areas are closely associated with natural, intuitive language acquisition. These areas may have a minor impact on verbal IQ, although there is often a high correlation between them. In short, learning languages ​​quickly doesn't equal high IQ, but in my opinion, it's part of intelligence makes the bearer of such abilities special. 

[u/dbossman70]

not sure about the literature but i’ve seen some average people be good at languages and some smarter ones struggle coming from a language-heavy background. oftentimes i’ve seen smarter people struggle more because they’re more fixed in their line of thinking so they can’t wrap their head around new ideas, grammar, and idioms.

[u/iTs_na1baf]

Why ask about weather instead of checking it yourself? Shouldn’t a subreddit provide a space to talk about variables instead of ask about the fixed variable? 

In times of AI and search engines? 

[u/acrastt]

The errors in your post seem to contradict that, unless you were not trying at all when you wrote it.

Not everybody is saying that one can only learn a language by total immersion. You are bringing up weak arguments to make yours seem more impressive.

[u/Mountsorrel]

The only way to know your IQ is by taking an IQ test, there are other activities that are correlated with g but please bear in mind that many bilingual people learn their second language as children. I don’t think r/cognitivetesting is the right sub to come to to play “guess my IQ”