BILINGUAL AND MONOLINGUAL DIFFERENCES ON SELF-ESTIMATES OF MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES REGARDING GENDER: A STUDY OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN IRAN

In the history of psychology, the nature of intelligence has been studied generally from two different perspectives. The first views intelligence as a unitary concept while the second supports multiple concept of intelligence. With respect to the effects of bilingualism on cognitive development, literature prior to the 1960s mostly shows that bilingualism is a negative phenomenon and thus has negative consequences on cognitive abilities while researches conducted after the 1960s mainly indicate cognitive advantages in bilingualism. As such, the primary objective of the present research was to explore the different intelligences in a sample of monolingual and bilingual high school students (fourth grade) of Fars and Khuzestan provinces in Iran. Furthermore, the study intended to investigate how students’ intelligences vary with regard to their gender. To fulfill these objectives, 448 monolingual and bilingual students were selected from among 67031 students in the 2012-2013 academic year. The data was collected through Multiple Intelligences Survey questionnaire developed by Armstrong (1993). The findings revealed that the bilingual students rated themselves higher on linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, and interpersonal intelligences than monolingual peers while monolingual students rated themselves higher on intrapersonal intelligence than bilingual students. Moreover, the male students gave higher self-estimates for logical-mathematical, spatial, and bodily-kinesthetic intelligences than their female peers while female students gave higher self-estimates for linguistic, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences than their male peers.