The relationship between creativity and language as measured by linguistic maturity and text production

Abstract

Creativity is the result of several converging elements, including cultural, environmental, and social factors. The context in which people live their lives not only affects their creativity; it also affects how they acquire and use language. This study shows how a person's context and linguistic development, as measured by linguistic maturity, affects their creativity. 249 students aged between 13 and 15, participated in the study by completing an online test measuring their linguistic maturity and creativity. This study used Guilford's (1967) Alternative Uses Test following the Consensual Assessment Technique. Regression models revealed a positive and significant influences of linguistic maturity on creativity. Greater semantic memory networks allow for more efficient searches, thus enabling creativity. Therefore, greater semantic richness leads to greater linguistic maturity, resulting in increased creativity. Our findings confirm a relationship between language skills and creativity (i.e., linguistic maturity and text production) at a deeper level than previously studied. This is relevant for both curriculum development and instructional design. In this sense, tools as ChatGPT that produce text from millions of documents, push the student to be mediator of all this linguistic richness. Furthermore, measuring linguistic maturity and text production provides another means to measure creativity, transcendent, considering that having proper approaches to measure creativity is a challenge.