Investigating the relationship between creativity and lexical networks

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to study the relationship between creativity and mental lexicons, through the use of an alternative uses test, a lexical association task and word embedding models. The hypothesis was that there is a positive correlation between the score that an individual obtains on a standardised, alternative uses creativity test and the semantic distance between associations they mention in a targeted lexical association task (the semantic distance being taken to be synonymous to inverse cosine similarity measure of the vectors of the words in a word embedding model). Each of 18 participants took part in an alternative uses test which was followed by a lexical association task. Responses collected were then analysed by the author of this dissertation. For the alternative uses creativity test, the score obtained by the participant was manually computed, based on a pre-devised marking scheme. For the lexical associations, the semantic distance between concepts was calculated based on the inverse similarity measures of the vectors, in two pre-trained word embedding models (Word2Vec and GloVe). The results for both tasks were compared and Pearson’s correlations were calculated between the normalised angular distance between words mentioned in the lexical association task, for both the total creativity scores, as well as for the four components of creativity (Fluency, Elaboration, Flexibility, Originality). A significant correlation was found between creativity and the semantic distances of words given in a lexical associations task. The fluency component of creativity was the most correlated creativity component to semantic distance. The order in which associations for the lexical association task were given did not make a difference to the size of the correlation between the creativity and lexical association task scores.