Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Whereas first language (L1) research has demonstrated thatperceptions of creative ability are influenced by the complexityand diversity of language used to answer verbal tests ofcreativity, relatively little is known about the linguisticcomponents of bilingual creative task performance. In thisstudy, we analyze written transcripts of speech produced by466 Japanese learners of English produced during a creativenarrative task for features related to linguistic and cognitivedimensions of creativity. Then, we extract various linguisticfeatures and test whether these features can predict humanperceptions of creativity for the transcripts. Unlike L1 data,results suggest text length and L2 proficiency comprise themost parsimonious explanation of creativity scores in this L2data. At the same time, linguistic features related to positivesentiment explained a significant yet small amount ofadditional variance in perceptions of creativity, suggestingtexts with more positive language were perceived to be morecreative.