| This study explores the hypothesis that bilingualism and/or biculturalism encourage divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility, which together facilitate creative thought. In the cross-regional study, 98 Russian-English bilingual college student immigrants living in the United States and 130 Russian-English bilingual university students living in Russia were compared with 47 monolingual English native speakers. Bilinguals were classified by their exposure to American and Russian cultures and their proficiency in English and Russian. Self-report questionnaires were used to assess participants' cultural and linguistic background. Language proficiency was assessed using a modified version of the Picture Naming task, and divergent thinking abilities were assessed with the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA). It was shown that when the effect of biculturalism was partialed out, bilinguals who were highly proficient in at least one language outperformed monolinguals on the parts of the ATTA that tested ability to simultaneously activate multiple unrelated concepts (fluency) and keep them active during the thought process (elaboration). This finding suggests that although bilingualism may lay the foundation for creative thinking, it does not necessary imply being creative. When the effect of bilingualism was controlled for, cross-cultural (or, possibly, subcultural) experience had a negative effect on divergent thinking. These findings suggest that bilingualism should be studied not only in the context of individuals' linguistic abilities, but also in the sociocultural context. Finally, a spreading activation process is proposed as a cognitive mechanism underlying basic processing in divergent thinking. A specific architecture of bilingual memory in which two lexicons are mutually linked to the conceptual system is speculated to facilitate the functioning of spreading activation mechanism. |
