Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Bilinguals are purported to be more creative than monolinguals, but the mechanism for this bilingual advantage is stillunresolved, with several different accounts proposed. Others have challenged the existence of bilingual advantages ingeneral. We examine existence as well as hypothesized semantic network difference based mechanisms for the relationshipbetween bilingualism and creativity here by measuring creativity and fluency for monolinguals and bilinguals. The fluencymeasure allowed us to analyze the structure of individuals semantic networks (average shortest path length, clusteringcoefficient, and modularity). We found no differences in creativity between monolingual and bilingual participants, with aBayesian test showing substantial evidence for the null hypothesis. We did find that aspects of semantic network structurepredicted creativity. These findings suggest that, contrary to previous work, the bilingual advantage does not exist in therealm of creativity.