Slack:
https://bcccd.slack.com/archives/C02QDS3338QPınar Karataş 1, Belkıs Sayın 2, Simge Sarıçiçek 1, Karla Tüzütürk 1, Aslı Aktan-Erciyes 11 Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey; 2 Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, TurkeyPrevious research demonstrated positive relationship between bilingualism and creativity (e.g., Madhav and Anand, 2012). Verbal creativity refers to generating original, novel, and flexible narrations. Some findings indicated that monolinguals are better at verbal-creativity tasks due to the better L1 (e.g.,Kharkhurin, 2010), others show bilingual advantage on verbal creativity (e.g.,Sampedro & Peña, 2019). Present study investigates how being bilingual affects verbal creativity of preschool children, controlling L2-proficiency, socioeconomic-status, and EFs.
Fifty-six 5-to-6-year-old (Mage=65.5 months, SD=7.8) L1-Turkish L2-English-speaking children participated in the study. We administered Backward-Digit-Span, Dimensional-Change-Cart-Sort, and Story-Completion, Bear-Dragon tasks to measure working-memory, cognitive-flexibility, inhibitory-control, and verbal-creativity. Participants were assessed on their L1-Turkish and L2-English. Children were categorized into two groups depending on their L2-proficiency, (i.e., high-bilinguals vs. low-bilinguals). We predicted that being high-bilingual and having better EFs would be positively associated with verbal creativity.
We performed hierarchical linear regression analysis, taking verbal-creativity score as an outcome variable and SES, EFs, and bilingual group and L1-proficiency as predictor variables. The results indicated that being high-bilingual(β=.3) and having lower working-memory(β=.07) L1-proficiency (β=.01) is associated with higher verbal creativity (R2=.29, p’s<.05). Cognitive-flexibility, inhibitory-control, and SES were not associated with verbal-creativity (p’s>.05). Findings indicate that high-bilingualism, L1-proficiency, and lower working-memory are associated with better verbal-creativity performance. L1-proficiency and high-bilingualism would promote performance in verbal-creativity due to the advanced use of language (Kharkhurin, 2010), and enriched linguistic skills (Lee and Kim, 2013). Unexpectedly, lower working-memory-capacity was associated with lower verbal-creativity, which might be a specific consequence of L2-schooling on the performance of Digit-Span.
- Session 11, Friday, 14 Jan, 07:00 - 08:30 (UTC +0)
- Session 3, Tuesday, 11 Jan, 13:00 - 14:30 (UTC +0)
