Does Word Frequency Impact Ideational Fluency in Divergent Thinking? A Meta-analytic Exploration with the Alternate Uses Test

Abstract

The Alternate Uses Test (AUT) is one of the most popular divergent thinking tasks and commonly used to measure creativity. Researchers using AUT often pick an everyday object and instruct participants to think of possible uses for it. Yet, the word frequency of the selected objects may impact the outcomes. The present study investigates the variation in the fluency scores from AUT in terms of word frequency values of the selected everyday object. We expected a positive relationship between the word frequency metrics and the fluency scores when other potential factors are controlled such as time-on-task, explicit instructions, the form of task administration and a number of various psycholinguistic characteristics. The mean effect (average fluency score) is 9.08, 95% [7.54, 10.61] from 114 effects from 31 studies. There was a significant interaction effect of Time-on-Task and Word Frequency (b = -.01, t (3.05) = -3.51, p = .038). These findings indicate that word frequency is correlated with fluency scores under strict time conditions, and this effect seems to disappear with lenient time conditions. The results are discussed based on the recommended assessment practices in the literature.