Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Experimental findings about linguistic creativity are typically based on a limited set of creative devices, most commonly metaphor. Here, we compare the subjective perception of novel metaphors in English with another prevalent creative device: "verbing," the derivation of new verbs from formally identical nouns (e.g., to museum the artifacts). We provide familiarity, meaningfulness, and aesthetic pleasure ratings for a large set of creative verbing and metaphor stimuli with matched controls (n = 486). Both devices were rated as relatively unfamiliar but meaningful. Only novel metaphors, but not verbing, were perceived as highly pleasurable. This partly conflicts with prior work on the relationship between creativity and aesthetic appreciation, which predicts that pleasure should increase for novel but meaningful stimuli. Our findings suggest that the link between creative cognition, as illustrated by different types of novel linguistic devices, and aesthetic appreciation is more complex than previously reported.