The Role of Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Experiences in Bilinguals' Divergent Thinking

Abstract

Research addressing the possible consequences of bilingualism for individuals’ creative abilities has revealed a contradiction between experimental findings of bilinguals’ superiority in creative tasks and real life observations of no significant relationship between being bilingual and being creative. This chapter makes an attempt to resolve this contradiction and investigates a possible effect that bilingualism might have on creative abilities. Three factors in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural experiences of bilingual individuals are examined: language proficiency, age of second language acquisition, and experience and participation in two cultures. The empirical study with Russian-English bilingual immigrants living in the United States and English monolingual native speakers revealed that cross-linguistic factors in bilinguals’ development had an influence on their divergent thinking abilities, which is a necessary component of creative thought. These findings suggest that although bilingualism may lay the foundation of creative thinking it does not necessarily imply being creative. To account for these findings, a cross-language transfer is proposed as a cognitive mechanism facilitating divergent thinking in bilinguals. A specific architecture of bilingual memory in which two lexicons are mutually linked to the shared conceptual system is theorized to facilitate the functioning of the cross-language transfer. The present study contributes to creativity research by examining the effect of bilingualism on creative thinking. It will start out with a brief survey of existing literature on the relationship between bilingualism and creativity and discuss an apparent contradiction therein. Although it is suggested that bilinguals show greater performance on creativity tests, we do not see outbursts of creativity among nationals of bilingual countries. To account for this contradiction, the studywill offer a perspective on the relationship between bilingualism and creativity, in which bilingualism facilitates divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is assumed as a necessary but not sufficient trait of creative behavior. Subsequently, it will present empirical findings indicating the factors in bilingual development that may contribute to bilinguals’ superiority in divergent thinking. The following discussion will outline a model of bilingual memory, whose structure is suggested to facilitate cognitive processes underlying this trait. It will specifically