Events Calendar

Overcoming the Bias of Equating Verbal Fluency with Intelligence, with Angie Kim

Thursday, April 23

2:00 pm

Location: Village Center Meeting Room

Join us for the middle event in a day of programs with New York Times bestselling author Angie Kim, author of the 2026 Shorewood Reads selection Happiness Falls. 

Our society equates verbal skills, especially oral fluency, with intelligence. Fast talkers are presumed to be smart, whereas stutterers, immigrants with accents who speak “broken” English, and those who don’t speak at all are deemed “dumb” (a word that originally meant mute or unable to speak). Angie Kim learned this personally for the first time when she immigrated to the US in middle school. She didn’t speak English and she felt stupid, judged, and ashamed. Less than. She became fluent in English within a few years, but that experience shattered her self-confidence for a long time.

She was reminded of this experience later in life, when she found out that a friend’s nonspeaking autistic son—whom everyone had assumed were severely cognitively impaired, unable to read or write—had learned to express himself by pointing to letters on large boards. It turned out that his inability to speak was due to motor impairments, not cognitive issues. This experience led Angie to work with and write about people with a variety of speech impediments, who have beautifully formed thoughts they have trouble expressing to others. In this presentation, Angie will share her research and experiences with many types of non-speakers and non-fluent speakers, and she will challenge you to overcome the deep-seated bias so many of us have in equating verbal fluency with intelligence. This talk will include a free-flowing Q&A session.