It’s more like a person with IQ 150 will seem like a person with IQ 120; and a person with IQ 120 may seem like a person with IQ 90. The difference would depend on their language skills.
I am pretty sure that this doesn’t happen. The reason is that when you speak a language so badly that you make those kinds of mistakes that make you appear stupid, you also have an accent—and that is a sign to the listener that they have to account for your being someone with potentially poor command of a foreign language.
This won’t make the effect vanish completely, but I think it weakens it quite a bit so that it may not be a big issue in practice.
Incidentally, some people argue that for this reason, it’s better to not even try to have no accent. I’m not sure I agree. For one thing, an accent puts a sort of ceiling on how people will perceive your intelligence—you cannot, for example, make witty puns when you have a strong accent, because people will think it was unintentional and won’t give you credit for it.
And there’s brains like mine, which insist that the pronouncedness of one’s accent is correlated with intelligence. It probably is, though I suspect not as strongly as my brain thinks it is.
I am pretty sure that this doesn’t happen. The reason is that when you speak a language so badly that you make those kinds of mistakes that make you appear stupid, you also have an accent—and that is a sign to the listener that they have to account for your being someone with potentially poor command of a foreign language.
This won’t make the effect vanish completely, but I think it weakens it quite a bit so that it may not be a big issue in practice.
Incidentally, some people argue that for this reason, it’s better to not even try to have no accent. I’m not sure I agree. For one thing, an accent puts a sort of ceiling on how people will perceive your intelligence—you cannot, for example, make witty puns when you have a strong accent, because people will think it was unintentional and won’t give you credit for it.
And there’s brains like mine, which insist that the pronouncedness of one’s accent is correlated with intelligence. It probably is, though I suspect not as strongly as my brain thinks it is.