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The topic of foreign language anxiety has attracted considerable attention in the scientific community in recent years. However, there is no universal approach to how to overcome foreign language anxiety. Apart from everything else, it creates barriers and prevents foreign language learners from achieving high results. The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of prior experience of learning foreign languages on language anxiety. The study sample consisted of 152 Russian-speaking persons aged 16-45 who were surveyed using the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale to evaluate communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation and test anxiety. The participants also answered questions regarding their language learning experiences: about the number of acquired languages, the age of their acquisition and the level of proficiency in these languages. The MANCOVA results showed that the group with the similar language experience had lower levels of fear of negative evaluation ( F (1, 156) = 4.07, .05, η2 = .06). Based on the results of the study, the authors put forward several practical recommendations: firstly, it is advisable for the teacher to be aware of the student’s prior language experience; secondly, it is proposed, in the educational process, to focus on the similarities in the phonology of the languages being studied; and, thirdly, it is also useful to pay extra attention to common morphemes in different languages.

The study continues the exploration of the contribution of creative perception to creative potential. Creative potential was operationalized as divergent thinking and measured by the Abbreviated To...

The study initiated a project exploring a contribution of creative perception to creative behavior. This study investigated the factors in creative self-perception contributing to creative potential. Creative potential was operationalized as divergent thinking and measured by the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults. Creative self-perception was operationalized as creative self-efficacy and assessed by Khatena-Torrance Creative Perception Inventory. Undergraduate college students’ creative self-efficacy was found to make a reliable and measurable contribution to their divergent thinking performance. Specifically, fluency was predicted by initiative and intellectuality, originality—by initiative, and flexibility—by environmental sensitivity and self-strength. These findings suggested that in addition to process, product, person, place, persuasion, and potential perspectives, creativity construct could be evaluated from a standpoint of creative perception.

This study examines the effects of rarity and organization of stimulus material on divergent thinking. Divergent thinking was assessed by the Unusual Uses test, in which participants had to generate as many uses as possible for a wooden ruler. Participants were primed with either rare or common ideas which were presented either in three consequent sets, or simultaneously in one set. We found a significant effect of rarity on originality. With regard to originality, participants primed with rare stimuli significantly outperformed their counterparts primed with common stimuli. We also found a significant effect of organization on fluency. With regard to this parameter, participants primed with the distributed stimulus set significantly outperformed their counterparts primed with the simultaneous set. Finally, we found marginally significant interactive effect of rarity and organization on fluency and originality. Participants who were primed with rare stimuli in distributed sets tended to obtain higher fluency and originality scores than participants in other groups.

The study is a part of a research project, which explores the role of creative perception in creative behavior. We operationalized creative behavior as an ability to overcome structured imagination, as measured by the Invented Alien Creature test, and operationalized creative perception as a preference for complexity and asymmetry, which we assessed using a standard Barron–Welsh Art Scale. Our group of participants was composed of ninety-three undergraduate students from the United Arab Emirates. The degree to which one preferred complexity and asymmetry measurably contributed to their ability to overcome structured imagination. This finding adds another brick to the rising seventh pillar of the creativity construct, namely, creative perception. The article provides a first sketch of the creative perception paradigm.

This article presents a theoretical framework for the author’s experimental work in contemporary poetry, which has received the term cognitive poetry. In contrast to cognitive poetics, which applies the principles of cognitive psychology to interpret poetic texts, cognitive poetry applies these principles to produce poetic texts. The theoretical considerations of cognitive poetry are based on the assumption that one of the major purposes of creative work is to elicit an aesthetical reaction in the beholder. The aesthetical reaction to poetic texts could be achieved via their satiation with multiple meanings presented through multiple sensory modalities. Cognitive poetry employs techniques developed in cognitive psychology to explicitly address cognitive processes underlying the construction of multiple conceptual planes. The following techniques are discussed: priming, the Stroop effect, multimodal and multilingual presentations. The applications of these techniques are illustrated with examples of poetic texts produced by the author.

Using the author’s own words, this monograph signifies a bilingual turn in the scientific investigation of the relationship between language and thought. This book deserves to occupy a prominent pl...

This study explores the hypothesis that language of testing and mood states can influence creativity in bilinguals. Arabic–English bilingual speakers were induced into positive or negative mood states using film clips and recall-of-events procedures. Then, participants’ creativity was assessed with the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults. Participants were tested in either English or Arabic. A Picture Naming Test revealed English as participants’ stronger language and Arabic as their weaker language. Testing in English was found to enhance verbal fluency and originality, as compared to testing in Arabic. Most importantly, an interactive effect of induction (positive, negative) and language of testing (English, Arabic) on creativity emerged. The results revealed two conditions beneficial for participants’ nonverbal originality: a positive mood state when tested in English and a negative mood state when tested in Arabic. These results are discussed in light of the interactive effect of mood induction and linguistic context (stronger vs. weaker) on an individual's creativity.

Dynamic information in acoustical signals produced by bouncing objects is often used by listeners to predict the objects' future behavior (e.g., hitting a ball). This study examined factors that affect the accuracy of motor responses to sounds of real-world dynamic events. In experiment 1, listeners heard 2-5 bounces from a tennis ball, ping-pong, basketball, or wiffle ball, and would tap to indicate the time of the next bounce in a series. Across ball types and number of bounces, listeners were extremely accurate in predicting the correct bounce time (CT) with a mean prediction error of only 2.58% of the CT. Prediction based on a physical model of bouncing events indicated that listeners relied primarily on temporal cues when estimating the timing of the next bounce, and to a lesser extent on the loudness and spectral cues. In experiment 2, the timing of each bounce pattern was altered to correspond to the bounce timing pattern of another ball, producing stimuli with contradictory acoustic cues. Nevertheless, listeners remained highly accurate in their estimates of bounce timing. This suggests that listeners can adopt their estimates of bouncing-object timing based on acoustic cues that provide most veridical information about dynamic aspects of object behavior.

In this commentary, I raise an etiological question, which has been virtually excluded from the horizon of contemporary scholarship. In spite of a long history of philosophical, mystical, and religious approaches considering the transcendent and/or spiritual sources of human creativity, mainstream creativity researchers have become gradually reluctant to acknowledge the supernatural influences in this human endeavour. This account is either disregarded altogether or re-interpreted in a way that substitutes supernatural connections with observable and measurable processes. On the one hand, the latter approach appears to fall within the premises of modern science and thereby earns substantial attention the scientific community. On the other, this could be one of the reasons why creativity research has reached its epistemological cul-de-sac. I argue that by retaining the source of creativity within an individual, one annihilates the whole constellation of personality traits and processes, which have transcendent characteristics. It is important to integrate the study of transcendent experience into the study of cognitive, personality, and environmental underpinnings of creative faculties. A possible direction for this change is offered by transpersonal psychology, which makes an attempt to resurrect an investigation of spiritual reality and integrate it in the study of modern psychology. At the end of the commentary, I sketch a transcendental model of creativity developed along the lines of a transpersonal paradigm.

The purpose of this theoretical article is to provide an extended definition of creativity that embraces potential cross-cultural variations in this construct. Creativity is defined as a 4-criterion construct, which includes attributes of novelty, utility, aesthetics, and authenticity. Novelty attribute stipulates that a creative work brings something new into being, which presents a new conceptual framework and/or modifies or violates an existing one. Utility attribute stipulates that a creative work is what a producer or a recipient considers creative, what represents an important landmark in spiritual, cultural, social, and/or political environment, and what addresses moral issues. The aesthetics attribute stipulates that a creative work presents the fundamental truth of nature, which is reflected in a perfect order, efficiently presents the essence of the phenomenal reality, and is satisfactorily complex, expressing both tension and intrinsic contradiction. Authenticity attribute stipulates that a cre...

This study further explores the theme of bilingual creativity with the present focus on code-switching. Specifically, it investigates whether code-switching practice has an impact on creativity. In line with the previous research, selective attention was proposed as a potential cognitive mechanism, which on the one hand would benefit from extensive code-switching, and on the other, facilitate creative performance. One hundred and fifty-seven multilingual college students completed a code-switching attitudes and behaviors questionnaire, which served to select habitual and non-habitual code-switchers. These respective groups were compared on creativity and selective attention tests. Habitual code-switchers demonstrated greater innovative capacity than their non-habitual counterparts. However, these groups revealed no difference in selective attention. Moreover, the relationship between selective attention and innovative capacity was found only among non-habitual code-switchers. Further, code-switching induced by a particular emotional state and by a lack of specific vocabulary in a target language appeared to relate to increase in innovative capacity. The discussion of these results lays foundation for further empirical research investigating the role of bilinguals' code-switching in their creative capacity.

Kandinsky proposed a fundamental correspondence between primary colors and elementary forms: yellow – triangle, red – square, and blue – circle. This theory evoked a strong opposition among artists, design experts, and researchers. This theory was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 1 non-artist university students ( N = 284) were directly asked about the color-form assignment using a modified version of Kandinsky's questionnaire. The evidence did not support Kandinsky's theory. Rather, their preferences for colored forms were guided by pragmatic associations. A sub-sample ( N = 56) was further tested indirectly using a color-form priming technique, the evidence similarly not supporting Kandinsky's theory. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 in another sample of non-artist university students ( N = 60) using color/form recognition test. These findings are in line with earlier investigations which had employed survey methods to assess preference for colors and forms. Having presented a consistent pattern of results among the general population, eventually this theory must also be tested in a synesthetic population.

The study presents a web-based productive vocabulary assessment tool, the internet Picture Naming Test (iPNT). The iPNT is administered online and takes eight minutes to complete. The iPNT assesses vocabulary knowledge by rating participants’ responses to 120 colored drawings of simple objects. Participants type the names of the objects and the names are saved as a computer file that can be uploaded into statistical software for further processing. The test is rated by comparing participants’ responses against a list of correct labels. High test-retest reliability suggests that iPNT can be considered a reliable measure. The study evaluates convergent validity of the iPNT by comparing its scores with paper-based and oral versions of the same test and concurrent validity by comparing its scores with that of receptive Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a language aptitude Cloze test, standard admission Test of English as a Foreign Language, and DIALANG diagnostic tool. Highly significant correlations between the scores on these tests and iPNT scores suggest that the latter is a suitable assessment tool for language proficiency. However, the moderate correlation values ranging from .52 to .68 indicate that the use of this test should be limited to psychometric research assessing an individual’s productive vocabulary knowledge.

The study presents a systematic investigation of the cognitive mechanisms of selective attention that potentially mediate the effect of bilingualism on creative abilities. The performance of 90 bilingual college students with different proficiency levels in English was compared on a battery of creativity and cognitive measures. Linguistically advanced bilinguals demonstrated greater abilities to produce original and useful ideas and to think beyond standard categories in creative problem-solving. Two mechanisms of selective attention were identified as contributors to the improvement of bilingual creative abilities. The inhibition of irrelevant information seemed to enhance the capacity to produce original and useful ideas. The facilitation of relevant information was likely to boost the ability to activate a multitude of unrelated concepts and work through the concepts already activated. Bilinguals with different levels of linguistic skills were found to utilize these mechanisms differently and thereby t...

The performances of Russian-English bilinguals and English monolinguals living in the United States, and Farsi-English bilinguals living in the United Arab Emirates and Farsi monolinguals living in Iran, were compared on the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults to investigate whether the sociocultural context modulates the influence of bilingualism on an individual’s creativity. The findings revealed an interactive influence of bilingualism and sociocultural context on creative potential, suggesting that the contribution of bilingual development to creative potential differs across cultures.

The study investigates whether bilingualism has a measurable contribution to verbal and nonverbal creative performance. The performance of Russian—English bilingual and English monolingual college students residing in the USA was compared on the verbal and nonverbal indicators of the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults. The results demonstrated a bilingual advantage in nonverbal creativity and a monolingual advantage in verbal creativity. These findings contribute to the discussion of domain specificity of bilingual cognitive abilities with regard to creative thinking.

This study explores how learners generalize grammatical categories such as noun gender. Adult native English speakers with no prior knowledge of Russian (N = 47, ages 17- 55 years) were trained to categorize Russian masculine and feminine diminutive nouns according to gender. The training set was morphophonologically homogeneous due to similarities induced by the diminutive suffixes. Generalization was tested using simplex and diminutive nouns with trained or novel stems. Age, familiarity with other second languages, nonverbal intelligence, and verbal working memory capacity were used to predict performance. Compared to trained diminutives, learners showed equally high accuracy in gender categorization of transparent simplex nouns with trained stems and diminutive nouns with novel stems. Accuracy dropped significantly for nontransparent simplex nouns with trained stems and transparent simplex nouns with novel stems. Verbal working memory capacity predicted gender categorization of nontransparent nouns and vocabulary recall, whereas age, nonverbal intelligence, and prior experience with languages with transparent gender categories affected performance in nouns containing at least some degree of gender transparency. The findings indicate that pattern-based and memory-based learning processes coexist in adult learners. However, age affected performance on pattern-based processes but not memory-based processes like rote memorization of vocabulary and gender categorization of nontransparent nouns. This finding is interpreted in the context of proposals concerning the role of declarative and procedural memory in L2 learning.

This study continues the effort to investigate the possible influence of bilingualism on an individual’s creative potential. The performances of FarsiEnglish bilinguals living in the UAE and Farsi monolinguals living in Iran were compared on the Culture Fair Intelligence Test battery and two creativity tests: divergent thinking test (the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults) and structured imagination test (Invented Alien Creatures task). The findings of the divergent thinking test revealed that bilingualism facilitates the innovative capacity, the ability to extract novel and unique ideas, but not the generative capacity, the ability to generate and process a large number of unrelated ideas. The findings of the test of structured imagination demonstrated that bilingualism strengthens an ability to violate a standard set of category properties. In addition, the study hints at the construct validity of these two tests of creative functioning. However, the study acknowledges its rather exploratory character as the bilingual and monolingual groups might differ in a number of uncontrolled sociocultural factors that could potentially mediate the effect of bilingualism.

Does native language phonology influence visual word processing in a second language? This question was investigated in two experiments with two groups of Russian-English bilinguals, differing in their English experience, and a monolingual English control group. Experiment 1 tested visual word recognition following semantic categorization of words containing four phonological vowel contrasts (\({/{{\rm i}}/-/{{\rm u}}/, /{{\rm I}}/-/\wedge/, /{{\rm i}}/-/{{\rm I}}/, /{{\varepsilon}}/-/\ae/}\)). Experiment 2 assessed auditory identification accuracy of words containing these four contrasts. Both bilingual groups demonstrated reduced accuracy in auditory identification of two English vowel contrasts absent in their native phonology (\(/{{\rm i}}/-/{{\rm I}}/, /{\varepsilon}/-/\ae/\)). For late- bilinguals, auditory identification difficulty was accompanied by poor visual word recognition for one difficult contrast (/i/-/I/). Bilinguals’ visual word recognition moderately correlated with their auditory identification of difficult contrasts. These results indicate that native language phonology can play a role in visual processing of second language words. However, this effect may be considerably constrained by orthographic systems of specific languages.

The study argues that, in addition to advantages in conscious attention-demanding processing, bilinguals may also exhibit enhanced unconscious divergent thinking. To investigate this issue, the performance of Russian–English bilingual immigrants and English monolingual native speakers was compared on the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults, which is a traditional assessment tool of divergent thinking. The study reveals bilinguals' superiority on divergent thinking tasks that require the ability to simultaneously activate and process multiple unrelated concepts from distant categories. Divergent thinking was facilitated by bilinguals' proficiency in two languages, the age of acquisition of these languages and the length of exposure to the new cultural settings that accompanies the acquisition of a new language. A specific architecture of bilingual memory in which two lexicons are mutually linked to the shared conceptual system is theorized to facilitate the functioning of the language mediated concept activation, thereby encouraging bilinguals' divergent thinking performance.

The major theme of this chapter appears at the intersection of two large fields of scientific inquiry: creativity and bilingualism. The research in this area is thin on the ground, for very little attention has been paid to the potential impact of bilingual practice on an individual’s creative potential. In the monograph Multilingualism and Creativity, I have presented an overview of the existing empirical studies demonstrating that both children and adults who speak more than one language have a predominant advantage over their monolingual counterparts, in various creativity tests. The monograph also presented specific aspects of bilingual practice that strengthen certain cognitive processes underlying creative thinking. Those aspects reflect bilingual individuals’ proficiency in languages they speak, the age at which they acquired their languages, an ability to alternate and mix different languages, and the sociocultural and emotional contexts of acquisition and use of their languages. The monograph made an unequivocal conclusion that bilingual development may facilitate individuals’ creative potentials. This rather promising conclusion leads us to consider how this effect can be realized in education.

This study examines the effects of the novelty and organization of stimulus material on divergent thinking. Participants were 129 undergraduate students of (84 male and 45 female) aged between 17 and 20. Divergent thinking was assessed by the Unusual Uses test, in which participants had to generate as many uses as possible for a wooden ruler. Participants were primed with either rare or common ideas which were presented either in three sets or simultaneously in one set. We found a significant effect of novelty on originality. Participants primed with rare stimuli significantly outperformed those primed with common stimuli on originality. We also found a significant effect of organization on fluency. Participants primed with the discrete stimulus set significantly outperformed those primed with the concurrent stimulus set on fluency. Finally, we found a marginally significant interactive effect of novelty and organization on fluency and originality. Participants who were primed with rare stimuli in discrete sets tended to obtain higher fluency and originality scores than participants in other groups. This means that the discrete organization of stimuli presentation can serve as a means to strengthen the positive effect of novel stimuli exposure. The results of the study can be applied to procedures and techniques for the stimulation of creativity.

This study investigated the perception of American-English (AE) vowels and consonants by young adults who were either (a) early Arabic-English bilinguals whose native language was Arabic or (b) native speakers of the English dialects spoken in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where both groups were studying. In a closed-set format, participants were asked to identify 12 AE vowels presented in /hVd/ context and 20 AE consonants (C) in three vocalic contexts: /aCa/, /iCi/, and /uCu/. Both native Arabic and native English groups demonstrated high accuracy in identification of vowels (70 and 80% correct, respectively) and consonants (94 and 95% correct, respectively). For both groups, the least-accurately identified vowels were /o/, /(see text)/, /ae/, while most consonant errors were found for /(see text)/, which was most frequently confused with /v/. However, for both groups, identification of /(see text)/ was vocalic-context dependent, with most errors occurring in liCil context and fewest errors occurring in luCu/ context. Lack of significant group differences suggests that speech sound identification patterns, including phonetic context effects for /(see text)/, were influenced more by the local English dialects than by listeners' Arabic language background. The findings also demonstrate consistent perceptual error patterns among listeners despite considerable variation in their native and second language dialectal backgrounds.

Research addressing the possible consequences of bilingualism for individuals’ creative abilities has revealed a contradiction between experimental findings of bilinguals’ superiority in creative tasks and real life observations of no significant relationship between being bilingual and being creative. This chapter makes an attempt to resolve this contradiction and investigates a possible effect that bilingualism might have on creative abilities. Three factors in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural experiences of bilingual individuals are examined: language proficiency, age of second language acquisition, and experience and participation in two cultures. The empirical study with Russian-English bilingual immigrants living in the United States and English monolingual native speakers revealed that cross-linguistic factors in bilinguals’ development had an influence on their divergent thinking abilities, which is a necessary component of creative thought. These findings suggest that although bilingualism may lay the foundation of creative thinking it does not necessarily imply being creative. To account for these findings, a cross-language transfer is proposed as a cognitive mechanism facilitating divergent thinking in bilinguals. A specific architecture of bilingual memory in which two lexicons are mutually linked to the shared conceptual system is theorized to facilitate the functioning of the cross-language transfer. The present study contributes to creativity research by examining the effect of bilingualism on creative thinking. It will start out with a brief survey of existing literature on the relationship between bilingualism and creativity and discuss an apparent contradiction therein. Although it is suggested that bilinguals show greater performance on creativity tests, we do not see outbursts of creativity among nationals of bilingual countries. To account for this contradiction, the studywill offer a perspective on the relationship between bilingualism and creativity, in which bilingualism facilitates divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is assumed as a necessary but not sufficient trait of creative behavior. Subsequently, it will present empirical findings indicating the factors in bilingual development that may contribute to bilinguals’ superiority in divergent thinking. The following discussion will outline a model of bilingual memory, whose structure is suggested to facilitate cognitive processes underlying this trait. It will specifically

Listeners can predict the timing of the next bounce of a bouncing ball by sound alone with high accuracy, relying primarily on temporal cues [Giordano et al., 2011, JASA, 129, 2594]. The present study investigated the role of temporal structure (natural bouncing patterns versus artificially reversed bouncing patterns) and event type (ball bouncing sounds versus similarly patterned tone bursts). After listening to two to four such sounds, listeners would indicate when they expected the next sound to occur (without hearing it). Results replicate previous findings of high accuracy in predicting the timing of natural bounce patterns regardless of event type. In contrast, accuracy was substantially poorer when pattern timing was reversed. Nevertheless, even for reversed patterns, listener accuracy improved as a greater number of bounces were heard prior to response time. This suggests that with additional information listeners were able to utilize veridical acoustic cues that best fit the temporal pattern. The...

The sound of a bouncing object is rich in dynamic acoustical information: subsequent bounces are more tightly spaced in time, have lower energy, and tend to excite less strongly the high‐frequency resonant modes of the bounced‐upon object. Previous studies on bouncing events show that dynamic information is not used to perceive the properties of the bouncing object. We tested whether this is the case when listeners are asked to predict the dynamic behavior of a bouncing event. Stimuli were recorded by dropping one of four different balls from various heights onto a hard linoleum surface. After hearing two, three, four, or five bounces, participants pressed a button to estimate the temporal location of the next bounce. No performance feedback was given. Participants never heard the bounce whose temporal location they were estimating. Bounce‐time estimates were very accurate (r = 0.96). Acoustic analyzes revealed a strong focus on timing information and a secondary reliance on energetic information. Spectral information appeared to have negligible effects. These findings demonstrate the extreme versatility of human listeners in using variable acoustic cues to determine the dynamic behavior of real‐world objects.

This study investigated the perception of American English (AE) vowels and consonants by proficient adult Arabic‐English bilinguals studying in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The native language of all participants was Arabic, and their average age of English acquisition was 6 years. In a closed set format, 29 participants were asked to identify 12 AE vowels presented in /hVd/ context and 20 AE consonants in three vocalic contexts: /ɑCɑ/, /iCi/, and /uCu/. Overall vowel identification was 70% correct. The three least‐accurately identified vowels were /ɑ/, /ɔ/, /ae/, which were 17%, 38%, and 54% correct, respectively. Most confusions were found among low and back vowels. Overall, perception of consonants was more than 90% correct in all three vocalic contexts. The most errors on consonants were found for /Ð/, i.e., 63% and 46% correct in /ɑCɑ/ and /iCi/ contexts, respectively. In both contexts, /Ð/ was most frequently confused with /v/. However, identification of /Ð/ in /uCu/ context was far more accurate; i.e., 97% correct. These results suggest a phonetic context effect on the cross‐language perception of consonants.

Visual and auditory recognition of English monosyllabic words was examined in 21 native Russian bilinguals and 12 monolingual speakers of American English. Stimuli comprised 40 CVC minimal pairs distinguishable by four vowel contrasts. Experiment 1 tested visual word recognition following a semantic categorization task. Sixty of the tested words were previously shown in the categorization task, and 60 were new words, 40 of which represented minimal pair alternatives to previously shown words. In experiment 2 participants listened to all words from each minimal pair spoken by one male and one female speaker, and selected one word from each pair. No significant differences were found in the number of errors made by the bilingual and monolingual participants during visual word recognition. In auditory word recognition, bilingual listeners made significantly more errors on the two vowel contrasts that cannot be differentiated based on their native phonological categories. Auditory errors on these categories strongly and significantly correlated with participant’s age of arrival to the U.S.A. These results demonstrate the influence of native language phonology on auditory, but not visual word recognition by Russian–English bilinguals.