Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Views of Intelligence
- 2 The Theory of Successful Human Intelligence
- 3 Metacognition: Thinking with Metacomponents
- 4 Advanced Problem-Solving Steps
- 5 Cognitive Processing: Performance Components (I)
- 6 Cognitive Processing: Performance Components (II)
- 7 Logical Reasoning and Analysis of Arguments: Performance Components (III)
- 8 Inference and Inferential Fallacies
- 9 Knowledge-Acquisition Components
- 10 Coping with Novelty
- 11 Deciding for Creativity
- 12 Automatizing Information Processing
- 13 Practical Intelligence
- 14 Why Intelligent People Fail (Too Often)
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
9 - Knowledge-Acquisition Components
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Views of Intelligence
- 2 The Theory of Successful Human Intelligence
- 3 Metacognition: Thinking with Metacomponents
- 4 Advanced Problem-Solving Steps
- 5 Cognitive Processing: Performance Components (I)
- 6 Cognitive Processing: Performance Components (II)
- 7 Logical Reasoning and Analysis of Arguments: Performance Components (III)
- 8 Inference and Inferential Fallacies
- 9 Knowledge-Acquisition Components
- 10 Coping with Novelty
- 11 Deciding for Creativity
- 12 Automatizing Information Processing
- 13 Practical Intelligence
- 14 Why Intelligent People Fail (Too Often)
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
It is often said that the main thing separating humans from other animal life is our ability to learn and use language. (It is not, as you may think, our ability to create bad television shows.) By any standard, this ability is impressive. With only minor flaws, we regularly use a grammatical system that to this day linguists and psychologists do not fully understand. We apply this grammatical system to vocabularies that, for adults, are usually estimated to exceed fifty thousand words; for educated adults, they may exceed seventy thousand or eighty thousand words. The exceptional size of people's vocabularies becomes even more amazing when we consider that only a very small proportion of these words were ever directly taught. In our early school years, we are probably more likely to have formal instruction in spelling than in vocabulary, and the vocabulary that is directly taught is apt to be the vocabulary that is most likely to be forgotten. However we learn the tens of thousands of words in our vocabulary, it is clearly not primarily from direct instruction.
The skills we use to acquire our vocabularies would seem to be critical as building blocks of our intelligence. Psychologists have found vocabulary to be one of the best single indicators, if not the very best indicator, of a person's overall level of intelligence.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Applied Intelligence , pp. 229 - 254Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008