The Way You Speak is a Reflection of your IQ

Intelligence is one of the first traits we subconsciously evaluate when encountering someone new. Is this person smart? Do they know what they are talking about? Can I trust their views? This isn't necessarily an ill-intentioned exercise in prideful comparison. Over time, humans have learned the importance of understanding who they are dealing with on a variety of levels. Our brains are pattern-matching machines, mapping current situations to past experiences and drawing conclusions.

Pause for a moment and consider how you assess someone else's intelligence. More often than not, it is largely based on the way they speak. For example, sentence structure, word choice, vocabulary, grammar, logical connections, organization, pace, and tone all play a role in forming this judgment. Luckily, these types of factors are quantifiable using linguistic AI and natural language processing (NLP) tools. Even better, many of these factors do, indeed, correlate with measured intelligence and life outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to present scientific evidence linking speech and intelligence. This relationship serves as a foundation for the Qualex investment process of rank ordering and investing in the smartest management teams in the stock market.

Example 1: Vocabulary

The ability to express ourselves is shaped, in large part, by the depth of our vocabulary. As far back as 1916, Stanford professor Lewis Terman, a pioneer of IQ testing, found that vocabulary strength was highly correlated with overall intelligence. Decades later, Robert Sternberg of Yale University reinforced this view, writing in his 1987 work:

“Vocabulary is probably the best single indicator of a person’s overall level of intelligence… if one wants a quick and not-too-dirty measure of a person’s psychometrically measured intelligence… vocabulary is generally the best predictor of overall score on a psychometric IQ test.”

In most studies, performance on the vocabulary sub-section of an IQ test generally has a 0.7 - 0.8 correlation with overall results and is usually right at the top of the list for the most predictive sub-sections (see table below). This is the case because vocabulary pulls on multiple cognitive functions at the same time including long-term memory, learning efficiency, abstract reasoning, and reading comprehension.

Similarly, studies have found that a person's vocabulary size, as well as the speed at which they can learn new words, is significantly correlated with their college GPA (1). Subsequently in life, college GPA is a well known predictive factor of future career success and earnings.

Example 2: Grammatical Structure

In a seminal study, David Snowden explored the correlation between autobiographical essays written by Catholic nuns in their early twenties and cognitive function later in life. The essays were scored for idea density and grammatical complexity, measures that serve as a proxies for general education/knowledge and working memory. A half century later, the nuns were given memory, concentration, language, and visuospatial intelligence tests.

Snowden concluded, "Our findings support a strong relationship between cognitive ability early in life, as indicated by linguistic ability, and cognitive function and Alzheimer's disease later in life. Low idea density in autobiographies, written at an average age of 22 years, significantly increased the risk of both poor cognitive function and Alzheimer's disease 58 years later." (2)

What's remarkable about this study is not simply the correlation of linguistic ability and intelligence, but the duration of that signal, lasting decades into the future.

Example 3: Linguistic Glue

In another study, the grammatical patterns used in college admissions essays were predictive of future academic performance. Among several findings, higher grades were correlated with greater usage of prepositions and articles, words that the researchers viewed as the structural scaffolding for complex thought.

The researchers concluded, "The most striking aspect of this project is that the most common and forgettable words in English can reveal the ways people think. Language is associated with observable behaviors that have implications for students’ success and for researchers’ understanding of that relationship. In the growing age of big data, we can now begin to identify the potential thinking patterns of individuals, groups, and perhaps even cultures for whom there exist language records." (3)

Conclusion

While nuance exists in every scientific field of study and applications vary across populations, the overarching principle that a person's speech can be used to derive meaningful observations about their intelligence is strong. The methodology Qualex Investment Management uses to rank order CEO intelligence was inspired by decades of cognitive research similar to the examples cited.

The implementation, however, has been tailored to the specifics and nuances of the investment industry and quantitatively backtested. Qualex blends time-tested linguistic principles with the latest AI tools and techniques to build and manage a long/ short equity fund that seeks to go long the smartest management teams in the market and short those that fall on the other side of the spectrum.

References: 1) Irvin, S., & Blankenship, K. G. (2022). Vocabulary & academic success in university undergraduate students. Teaching and Learning in Communication Sciences & Disorders, 6(2).

2) Snowdon, D. A., Kemper, S. J., Mortimer, J. A., Greiner, L. H., Wekstein, D. R., & Markesbery, W. R. (1996). Linguistic ability in early life and cognitive function and Alzheimer's disease in late life: Findings from the Nun Study. JAMA, 275(7), 528–532.

3) Pennebaker JW, Chung CK, Frazee J, Lavergne GM, Beaver DI (2014) When Small Words Foretell Academic Success: The Case of College Admissions Essays. PLoS ONE 9(12): e115844. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0115844

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