Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Knowing more than one language provides a speaker with an increased pool of linguistic experiences and concepts. This expanded language knowledge is thought to benefit bilingual speakers on standardized tests of creative ability. However, relatively little research has explored bilingual performance on tests of linguistic creativity. In this study we compare the production of creative, attenuated descriptions produced by English L1 and English L2 speakers. Using computational measures of text similarity, we find that English L2 answers were significantly less similar than L1 answers, suggesting a greater number of concepts and topics were used by the L2 participants. Additionally, unsupervised cluster analysis found no strong differences in the number of cluster topics between the L1 and L2 data. As such, the L2 answers contained more breadth, whereas the L1 answers contained more depth. The results may reflect fundamental differences in the storage and use of L1/L2 language knowledge.