JLA received a research grant with American Family Insurance. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.
Current address: Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, United States of America
Are bilinguals more creative than monolinguals? Some prior research suggests bilinguals are more creative because the knowledge representations for their second language are similarly structured to those of highly creative people. However, there is contrasting research showing that the knowledge representations of bilinguals’ second language are actually structured like those of less creative people. Finally, there is growing skepticism about there being differences between bilinguals and monolinguals on non-language tasks (e.g., the bilingual advantage for executive control). We tested whether bilinguals tested in their second language are more or less creative than both monolinguals and bilinguals tested in their first language. Participants also took a repeated semantic fluency test that we used to estimate individual semantic networks for each participant. We analyzed our results with Bayesian statistics and found support for the null hypothesis that bilingualism offers no advantage for creativity. Further, using best practices for estimating semantic networks, we found support for the hypothesis that there is no association between an individual’s semantic network and their creativity. This is in contrast with published research, and suggests that some of those findings may have been the result of idiosyncrasies, outdated methods for estimating semantic networks, or statistical noise. Our results call into question reported relations between bilingualism and creativity, as well as semantic network structure as an explanatory mechanism for individual differences in creativity.
Scientists continue to debate whether being fluent in two or more languages hurts, helps, or has no relation to various characteristics of a person, ranging from creativity to greater financial earnings [
Recently, other researchers have found empirical support that bilingual individuals are more creative than monolinguals [
In the experimental literature, there is some support for bilinguals being more creative than monolinguals, but it is not unequivocal (e.g. [
Creativity is a large concept that is often ill-defined [
Using recent advances in applying network theory to understand cognition [
An example semantic network. Concepts are encoded as nodes (circles) and associations between concepts are encoded as edges (lines). Semantic networks encode knowledge through the distributed associations between concepts.
Semantic networks have recently been used to explain individual differences in people’s knowledge [
In a parallel literature, researchers have also explored differences between bilinguals and monolinguals using networks. For example, Frenck-Mestre and Prince (1997) [
Although some researchers have found that the L2 semantic networks of individuals are more connected and less modular [
Finally, it is worth noting that there is growing skepticism in the bilingual literature about the existence of bilingual advantages [
With respect to individual-based network analyses, to the best of our knowledge, Benedek et al. (2017) have conducted the only analysis of creativity by estimating semantic networks for each individual [
Given these problems with previous creativity research using network analysis, we conducted a novel study that used empirically and theoretically supported best practices for estimating semantic networks. In light of our research goals including the possibility of our results supporting the null hypothesis, we use Bayesian statistics for data analyses, as these analyses are able to assess support for the null hypothesis [
To summarize, the predictions we identified based on prior literature for individual differences in creativity as related to bilingualism are shown in Figs
Bilinguals doing creativity tasks in their second language will score higher (or lower) than bilinguals doing creativity tasks in their first language because the semantic network for a language acquired second resembles semantic networks of highly (lowly) creative individuals.
It may be the case that factors other than differing semantic representations, such as increased executive functioning capabilities, are responsible for the relation between bilingualism and creativity. Note that we denote the causal direction from bilingualism to creativity as it is unlikely that most people become bilingual because they are creative.
Bilingualism is unrelated to creativity.
Note that whereas the two representation-based hypotheses only make predictions about relative differences between creativity in bilinguals tested in their L1 versus L2, the null hypothesis only makes predictions about bilinguals (irrespective of language in which they are tested) versus monolinguals. To investigate these hypotheses, we thus tested three groups of participants: English monolinguals, English-Spanish bilinguals (henceforth ES bilinguals for whom English is their first language) and Spanish-English bilinguals (henceforth SE bilinguals for whom English is their second language). To measure individual semantic networks, participants completed the repeated semantic fluency task, and we followed empirically validated best practices for estimating semantic networks from this fluency data [
Ninety-four participants were recruited for this study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison student population. Eighty-six of these participants were recruited from the undergraduate Psychology participant pool, and 8 more participants were recruited with emails to relevant groups (e.g. student clubs related to the Spanish language) and posters around campus. Participants were compensated for this hour-long experiment with either course credit or $10 per hour. Two of these 94 participants (one from each participant source) were excluded from all data analysis due to self-reporting proficiency in a third language other than Spanish or English.
The final sample consisted of 92 participants (46 men, 45 women, 1 person who chose not to respond), with a mean age of 18.72 (SD = 1.08). 51 participants self-identified as white, 28 as Latinx, 7 as both white and Latinx, and the remaining 6 participants self-identified as various other (combinations of) race(s).
All subjects were screened before they were eligible to participate. Due to the constraints of a pre-existing language background questionnaire used on the department-wide participant pool, participants were asked slightly different questions depending on whether they were recruited from this pool or not.
In the department-wide participant pool, students were eligible to participate in this study as ‘monolinguals’ if they indicated English as their native language and indicated no other languages learned in the home before age five. ‘Bilinguals’ recruited through the participant pool indicated a native language of either English or Spanish, and indicated that they had learned the other language at home before the age of five. Furthermore, these participants indicated no third language learned before the age of five.
Participants recruited outside of the department participant pool were pre-screened online using the “Language Proficiency” section of the of the Bilingual Language Profile [
The vast majority of participants (85 of 92 participants) were recruited through the participant pool. Participants recruited through both methods performed similarly on our measures. However, this is difficult to assess rigorously given the small sample of participants who were recruited outside the participant pool.
In order to measure creative thinking, all participants completed the Guilford’s Alternative Uses task [
In order to control for the potential influence of intelligence on creativity scores (e.g. [
To estimate individual participants’ semantic networks, all participants completed a repeated semantic fluency task. In this task, they were asked to list as many animals as they could within a three minute time period [
U-INVITE is a Bayesian inference method that finds a network that maximizes the product of two terms: the likelihood of the fluency data given a network, and the prior probability of that network. U-INVITE defines its likelihood according to a psychologically plausible retrieval model: a censored random walk [
In order to assess participants’ specific language experience, all participants completed the LEAP-Q questionnaire [
Each participant was given brief verbal instructions by an experimenter and signed a consent form before starting the experiment. Participants went through a self-guided multi-part survey through Qualtrics that included all of the different tasks mentioned above on a computer in a booth separated by a door from the experimenter. Each section of the survey was separated by a page that invited participants to take a break if they needed it. The first section consisted of demographic questions asking about age, gender identity, sexuality, and race. All participants then went through the experimental tasks in the following order: the Guilford’s Alternative Uses Task, the first semantic fluency task, Raven’s progressive matrices—shortened version, the second fluency task, the LEAP-Q, the final fluency task. The survey ended with a single, optional question about parental household income. We included this question because Kharkhurin (2009) found significant differences between the household incomes of bilingual and monolingual groups [
Three native English speaking undergraduate research assistants scored participants’ responses on the Guilford’s Creativity Task. All raters were naïve to the lingual status of the participants. Raters awarded one point for every valid alternative use, with an alternative use defined as a feasible and creative way to use the object (e.g. “poking holes” as a use for a pencil). No points were granted for typical uses of the object (e.g. “writing” as a use for a pencil), or for duplicate/similar entries (e.g. a participant answering both “poke holes” and “create holes” for the prompt “pencil”). Each rater independently scored all responses. Interrater reliability between each pair of raters had a Cohen’s Kappa of 0.84 or above. Creativity scores on each item were calculated by majority consensus on a given answer, therefore if two or more raters thought an answer was creative then a point was awarded.
As in the rest of the experiment, the repeated fluency task was conducted in English, therefore any Spanish words were counted as intrusions. Non-animal responses (e.g. ‘house’, ‘unicorn’) were also counted as intrusions. We recorded a total of 56 intrusions (<0.6%) out of 10,881 total responses across all participants. In total 22 participants (24% of participants) submitted one or more intrusions. As participants were instructed to list only animals, we removed all intrusions from the data before estimating participants’ semantic networks. Likewise, all perseverations (repetitions of an animal within a list) were removed from the data before network estimation and other analyses.
We used both the frequentist null-hypothesis significance testing standard in our field and Bayesian data analyses. Unlike frequentist statistics, Bayesian data analyses can show support of the null hypothesis by quantifying the support provided for one hypothesis compared to the other by the data [
H1, the representation-based advantage hypothesis, predicts that bilinguals tested in their second language are more creative, mediated by their semantic networks having properties that are similar to the semantic networks of highly creative people. H2, the representation-based disadvantage hypothesis, predicts the opposite: namely that bilinguals tested in their second language are less creative, mediated by a network structure that is less like the networks of highly creative people. Finally, H0, the null hypothesis, predicts that there is no relationship between bilingualism and creativity.
Violin plots showing the distribution as well as individual scores on the creativity measure, a) to compare the two different groups of bilingual participants and b) to compare the combined bilingual group (the combination of both violin plots on the left) with the monolingual group.
Prior research has compared bilinguals on semantic fluency measures in their first and second language, so here we present our results comparing our ES and SE bilingual groups on fluency measures in the context of this prior research. In this subsection, all statistical tests are broken into SE and ES bilingual groups (NSE = 28 and NES = 13). On the fluency measures, there was strong evidence that SE bilinguals produced fewer items than ES bilinguals (MSE = 33.3, SDSE = 6.5, MES = 42.1, SDES = 6.5; BF10 = 52.5, note BF10), which is expected given that SE bilinguals are performing the fluency task in their second language and consistent with prior findings [
Prior creativity research had identified that the semantic networks of more creative people are more connected as measured by a lower ASPL and a higher clustering coefficient [
Scatterplot with simple linear regression lines to illustrate how a) ASPL, b) clustering, c) modularity and d) small world coefficient are related to creativity for all 92 participants.
Given the amount of support for null hypotheses we have found so far, one might be concerned about our data. However, consistent with previous work, we found a trend that intelligent people tend to be more creative (
Scatterplot with a simple linear regression line to illustrate how a) intelligence and b) number of items listed in the fluency task are related to creativity for all 92 participants.
We tested two other hypotheses to rule out alternative hypotheses.
Our research failed to replicate previous work on the bilingual advantage or disadvantage on creativity, and supports the null hypothesis that bilingualism is not associated with creativity. We found no support for a representation-based advantage hypothesis or a representation-based disadvantage hypothesis. ES and SE bilinguals neither differed substantially nor did we have substantial evidence that their creativity scores were the same. Monolinguals scored as high on our test of creativity as bilinguals taken as one group. This is surprising given previous research [
We hypothesized that semantic networks could account for differences in creative thinking. Previous research indicated that the connectivity of a semantic network helped people think creatively, with more creative people having a more connected semantic network [
Our data were ambiguous as to evidence that SE and ES bilinguals were more or less creative. While we did find that they differed in the number of items listed in a fluency task, this was an expected result as there may be differences in speed of processing or the English vocabulary size between native and non-native English speakers. This again casts doubt on previous research and both of the representation-based hypotheses. Unsurprisingly, when we combined ES and monolinguals together to form a native English speakers group we found they were able to list more words on the fluency task than native Spanish speakers. Though the ability to list words correlated with creativity, native English speakers had no benefit in the creativity measure. In fact, proficiency in English did not correlate at all with the ability to list words on a fluency task or with creativity. This may be due to ceiling effects, as all Spanish native speakers in our experiment are living in an English speaking country and therefore can be presumed to get plenty of practice in their second language. Though our ES bilingual sample size was small, our sampling was relatively consistent between groups: gender ratios differed between groups, but age and SES did not.
We had a small sample size of ES bilinguals (N = 13), which reduced the statistical power of some aspects of the study. In particular, this limits the strength of the conclusions related to differences between L1 and L2 of bilinguals. However, almost all of our results with ES bilinguals had anecdotal or stronger support for the null hypothesis, namely there being no relation between creativity and bilingualism. Conclusions related to the general difference between bilinguals and monolinguals are stronger due to their larger sample sizes (41 and 25, respectively). The strongest conclusions are those that tested individual differences in estimated semantic networks as those included 92 participants. Further, we did replicate previous research finding a relation between intelligence and creativity. This mitigates concern that we did not find a result that appeal to our experiment having insufficient power to find any result.
Another limitation is that bilinguals are a very diverse group of people with incredibly different characteristics. Therefore our findings on a group of undergraduate participants may not represent trends found in bilinguals as a whole. However, given our long study time (40 minutes to an hour), we thought we could engage participants more if participants were run in person as opposed to recruiting a more diverse sample online through MTurk or another online survey. Furthermore, other factors besides language ability are relevant when looking at bilingual groups. Cultural background has been shown to be relevant in creativity research [
Our study is the first to find support for there being no relation between bilingualism and creativity. Using best practices for estimating semantic networks, we found support that there is no relation between the structure of a person’s semantic network and the extent of their creativity. This contradicts some recent work in this area, and suggests that researchers finding a relation between semantic network structure and creativity may have done so due to methodological issues or idiosyncrasies. The question is far from closed and more research in the area needs to be conducted. However, without publishing null results, especially those that find substantive support for the null hypothesis, researchers will be unable to appropriately judge whether there are relations [
We thank Elizabeth Pettit and Anantha Rao for help scoring the Guilford’s responses. We thank current and former Austerweil lab members, as well as the audience at CogSci 2018, for feedback on this study.
PONE-D-20-03820
Evidence against the bilingual advantage for creativity and the semantic network theory of creativity
PLOS ONE
Dear Dr Austerweil,
Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. First, let me apologise for the the lengthy review time. Given the current pandemic, finding reviewers was not easy. I'm now quite pleased to be able to write this letter. After careful consideration from two reviewers and myself, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.
I'm confident that you can address the reviewers' comments below. I have one additional comment. In the introduction, it would be good to address whether there is evidence that bilingualism increases creativity based on analysis of real-world creative achievement. Or does all the evidence come from increased performance on cognitive tasks meant to measure component cognitive processes that support real-world creativity? For example, are bilingual painters/musicians/authors more successful by some metric than monolingual painters/musicians/authors? There is evidence that international travel in scientists is associated with greater citation rate, and immigrants are over-represented as Nobel Prize winners. Are there similar analyses focusing on bilingualism specifically? Of course these kinds of observational studies have confounds that the kinds of experiments conducted here do not, but it is good to set the stage of what these experiments are trying to explain by discussing the pattern in the real-world. If there is no such evidence that bilinguals on the whole produce greater creative achievements, then it puts the search for the effects in experimental contexts in a different light. I imagine some of the papers you cited currently would directly address this issue.
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Reviewer #1: Overall an article that is sound and rigorous that could benefit with a few notes.
Re: #3: Data is not currently available on receipt of the manuscript for review, but authors do indicate that it will be available upon acceptance.
Re: #4: Minor errors throughout; interleaved with additional notes below for clarity.
line 28-30: Important to specify that flexible thinking is only one aspect of creativity; also, along with the demographic information collected, I would have liked to see educational background, since some college majors (for example) may have more experience with the type of flexible thinking that is being tested here.
line 120-121: The line about the H0 seems out of place here; move it up to at least the start of the paragraph, if not the start of the section on your hypotheses.
line 170: Include a line about how different the participants recruited via subject pool and those recruited and given the questionnaire to determine their bilingual status were.
line 262: change "...household incomes bilingual and monolingual" to "...household incomes OF bilingual and monolingual"
line 265: Remove "Plan" from the section heading; it is no longer a plan since the analysis has been done.
line 282: fix Latex typo at the beginning of the line
line 283: spell out "1" for consistency
line 345: remove "prior" to reduce any references to non-Bayesian priors
line 382: opening parenthesis needs to be closed somewhere
line 383, 391: Unclear whether BF10 is a typo for BF01 as used previously
line 392: Tense/aspect of "indicating" is odd; consider "indicates"
line 414: add "or disadvantage", since your data also doesn't support that bilingualism (or at least being tested in the L2) confers any disadvantage on flexible thinking. To that note, your title is splashy but somewhat misleading, since you find no advantage or disadvantage for bilinguals and their creativity, narrowly defined.
line 446-448: In reading the rest of the article, it's unclear to me "how bilingual" the SE and ES bilinguals were—that is, what does the various questionnaires' scoring really indicate regarding their language use and proficiency? If they had to name animals in English for the fluency task and all were effectively native-like speakers of English, I'm not sure the fluency task is relevant or meaningful (and is indeed likely a ceiling effect as you write); this could be different if there were more variability in the proficiency levels of both sets of bilinguals.
line 468-469: Take the ref to the studies about Hebrew out of the parenthetical, since that helps support your point.
Finally, are the lexicosemantic neighborhoods similar between English and Spanish? Differences in mapping can show up in word use (e.g., Bowerman & Choi 2001, Choi 2006, Pavlenko & Malt 2011), which might influence the intrusions or general performance on the fluency task.
Reviewer #2: Overall this paper provides a valuable contribution to the study of how bilingualism may affect general cognitive abilities, and creativity specifically. The authors methods are sound, as is how they theoretically situate their research. Specifically, the use of bayesian statistics to quantify evidence for null results is appropriate for the aims of the paper.
The following are some points I believe need addressing:
1. A notable limitation of the empirical study is the sample size, specifically the sample of only 13 bilinguals for whom Spanish is their second language and English their first (the ES sample). The authors do address this limitation in section 2 (line 451). However, there is a nuance here that I believe needs further clarification. The authors provide a defence against the claim that the sample was underpowered by appealing to the fact that they replicated a relation between intelligence and creativity. My issue is that this replication was for the whole sample of 92 participants (unless I am mistaken), which seems to me orthogonal to the question of whether the ES sample is sufficient to make the various comparisons to the SE and monolingual samples. Thus, a clearer link needs to be drawn to justify the connection or this needs to be separated from the defence of the ES sample size limitation.
Furthermore, the authors also defend against this ES sample size limitation by referring to the fact that results including the ES sample showed anecdotal or stronger support for the null. Again here, there is potential for confusion as the ‘better than anecdotal’ level evidence was only for when the ES sample was combined with the larger SE sample and then compared against monolinguals. There were also a number of inconclusive comparisons (between SE and ES) regarding semantic network parameters not mentioned here in the limitations section, which should be mentioned as results which may have been limited by sample size.
In summary, I feel that this limitations sections should be revised to make more transparent which particular conclusions from the analysis were limited by this small ES sample.
Additionally, there are a number of other small modifications regarding typos and general style etc:
2. The introduction section is well written, however, the section from line 1 to line 68 needs to be broken up into smaller paragraphs, as it presently appears to be a single massive one. For example, I recommend a paragraph break after “creativity” on line 14 and again after “stored” on line 28… as well as further breaks in this vein going forward.
3. There is no author information on reference 9 (i.e. Kharkhurin, 2009 reference), also no journal information on ref 26. Please double check other references as well.
4. Please remove fullstops at the beginning of paragraphs on line 267, 279, 288, 335, 362.
5. No space after fullstop on line 419 e.g. “group.This” also no space in “hypothesis,namely” on 454
6. You may wish to include a recently published large sample demonstration of no general advantage of bilingualism - Nichols, E. S., Wild, C. J., Stojanoski, B., Battista, M. E., & Owen, A. M. (2020). Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: a population study of executive function in 11,000 people. Psychological Science.
7. I recommend rewriting the sentences containing bracketed stats in the following way, such that the bracketed stats are at the end of the phrase. This makes it far easier to read. e.g. your original was “We found substantial evidence that the ASPL (r = 0.11, BF01 = 4.65 with uniform prior, BF01 = 14.6 with directional negative prior based on Benedek et al., 2017 and Bernard, Kenett, Ovando-Tellez, Benedek & Volle, 2019 [26,59]; Fig 7a) was not correlated with creativity scores.” —> I recommend “We found substantial evidence that the ASPL was not correlated with creativity scores (r = 0.11, BF01 = 4.65 with uniform prior, BF01 = 14.6 with directional negative prior based on Benedek et al., 2017 and Bernard, Kenett, Ovando-Tellez, Benedek & Volle, 2019 [26,59]; Fig 7a). ”
Finally, I thank the authors for their hard work and hope they are keeping well in this current stressful covid-19 situation.
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Dear Dr Austerweil,
Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. First, let me apologise for the the lengthy review time. Given the current pandemic, finding reviewers was not easy. I'm now quite pleased to be able to write this letter. After careful consideration from two reviewers and myself, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.
I'm confident that you can address the reviewers' comments below.
Thank you and the reviewers for your hard work reviewing our manuscript. We understand that it is a difficult time. We especially appreciate the detailed feedback clarifying our writing. It will strengthen the manuscript.
I have one additional comment. In the introduction, it would be good to address whether there is evidence that bilingualism increases creativity based on analysis of real-world creative achievement. Or does all the evidence come from increased performance on cognitive tasks meant to measure component cognitive processes that support real-world creativity? For example, are bilingual painters/musicians/authors more successful by some metric than monolingual painters/musicians/authors? There is evidence that international travel in scientists is associated with greater citation rate, and immigrants are over-represented as Nobel Prize winners. Are there similar analyses focusing on bilingualism specifically? Of course these kinds of observational studies have confounds that the kinds of experiments conducted here do not, but it is good to set the stage of what these experiments are trying to explain by discussing the pattern in the real-world. If there is no such evidence that bilinguals on the whole produce greater creative achievements, then it puts the search for the effects in experimental contexts in a different light. I imagine some of the papers you cited currently would directly address this issue.
We agree adding an example related to real-world creativity to the introduction strengthens our manuscript. We added the following paragraph to the introduction which appears on page 2 of the revised manuscript.
Some of this research is motivated by analyzing characteristics of individuals who produce real-world creative feats. For example, nine of the top ten countries with the most Nobel prize winners per capita (in countries with populations greater than one million) have two or more official languages (Switzerland, Ireland, East Timor, and Israel) or an overwhelming majority of citizens reporting bi- or multilingualism (Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Norway, and Germany) (Kharkhurin, 2012). These observational analyses are illuminating, but unfortunately, they are difficult to assess from a scientific perspective due to confounds (e.g., is it multilingualism or multiculturalism?), and other concerns.
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter.
See page one of the cover letter.
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They are accessible now at
3. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript:
"KVL was supported by the UW-Madison L&S Senior Honors Thesis Research Grant. JLA was supported by the Office of the CVGRE at UW-Madison with funding provided from the WARF."
We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form.
Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows:
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publish, or preparation of the manuscript."
We cut the funding information from the acknowledgements. Please see page one of the cover letter for the updated text of the Funding Statement.
Reviewers' comments:
Reviewer #1: Overall an article that is sound and rigorous that could benefit with a few notes.
Re: #3: Data is not currently available on receipt of the manuscript for review, but authors do indicate that it will be available upon acceptance.
They are now available at
Re: #4: Minor errors throughout; interleaved with additional notes below for clarity.
line 28-30: Important to specify that flexible thinking is only one aspect of creativity;
Thank you for the suggestion. We added a clarification to the revised manuscript, which appears on lines 37-40.
also, along with the demographic information collected, I would have liked to see educational background, since some college majors (for example) may have more experience with the type of flexible thinking that is being tested here.
Unfortunately, we did not record the participants’ majors. We agree educational background could be illuminating for the reasons the reviewer mentions.
line 120-121: The line about the H0 seems out of place here; move it up to at least the start of the paragraph, if not the start of the section on your hypotheses.
Thank you for this suggestion. We moved the definition of the null hypothesis to earlier in our section on hypotheses. It now appears on lines 108-110 of the revised manuscript.
line 170: Include a line about how different the participants recruited via subject pool and those recruited and given the questionnaire to determine their bilingual status were.
Added to manuscript “The vast majority of participants (85 of 92 participants) were recruited through the participant pool. Participants recruited through both methods performed similarly on our measures. However this is difficult to assess rigorously given the small sample of participants who were recruited outside the participant pool.” It appears on line
line 262 line 382: opening parenthesis needs to be closed somewhere
Thank you. We implemented these minor changes throughout.
line 383, 391: Unclear whether BF10 is a typo for BF01 as used previously
It is not a typo. Thank you for checking.
line 392: Tense/aspect of "indicating" is odd; consider "indicates"
Thank you. We implemented this change which appears on line 402.
line 414: add "or disadvantage", since your data also doesn't support that bilingualism (or at least being tested in the L2) confers any disadvantage on flexible thinking. To that note, your title is splashy but somewhat misleading, since you find no advantage or disadvantage for bilinguals and their creativity, narrowly defined.
We agree and decided to change our title to: Evidence against a relation between bilingualism and creativity
line 446-448: In reading the rest of the article, it's unclear to me "how bilingual" the SE and ES bilinguals were—that is, what does the various questionnaires' scoring really indicate regarding their language use and proficiency? If they had to name animals in English for the fluency task and all were effectively native-like speakers of English, I'm not sure the fluency task is relevant or meaningful (and is indeed likely a ceiling effect as you write); this could be different if there were more variability in the proficiency levels of both sets of bilinguals.
The bilingualism literature has wrestled for a long time with respect to how to define a “true” bilingual and different gradations from there. The measure we use, the LEAP-Q, is a well-established method in the literature. There is no component of the LEAP-Q that elicits participants to list animals in any language. Assessing the efficacy of the LEAP-Q and what the best measure of bilingualism proficiency for examining differences in creativity between monolinguals and bilinguals is beyond the scope of our manuscript.
line 468-469: Take the ref to the studies about Hebrew out of the parenthetical, since that helps support your point.
This suggestion is implemented in the revised manuscript on line 407.
Finally, are the lexicosemantic neighborhoods similar between English and Spanish? Differences in mapping can show up in word use (e.g., Bowerman & Choi 2001, Choi 2006, Pavlenko & Malt 2011), which might influence the intrusions or general performance on the fluency task.
There are many potential lexiosemantic differences to investigate between English and Spanish. We agree with the reviewer that it would be interesting to examine them and their relation to fluency tasks. However, the number of errors in the fluency data is quite small (only 56 of 10,881 responses). Given the small number of errors, it would be extremely challenging to make any statistically meaningful claims about errors on the fluency task and the lexiosemantic properties of English and Spanish from our results..
Reviewer #2: Overall this paper provides a valuable contribution to the study of how bilingualism may affect general cognitive abilities, and creativity specifically. The authors methods are sound, as is how they theoretically situate their research. Specifically, the use of bayesian statistics to quantify evidence for null results is appropriate for the aims of the paper.
The following are some points I believe need addressing:
1. A notable limitation of the empirical study is the sample size, specifically the sample of only 13 bilinguals for whom Spanish is their second language and English their first (the ES sample). The authors do address this limitation in section 2 (line 451). However, there is a nuance here that I believe needs further clarification. The authors provide a defence against the claim that the sample was underpowered by appealing to the fact that they replicated a relation between intelligence and creativity. My issue is that this replication was for the whole sample of 92 participants (unless I am mistaken), which seems to me orthogonal to the question of whether the ES sample is sufficient to make the various comparisons to the SE and monolingual samples. Thus, a clearer link needs to be drawn to justify the connection or this needs to be separated from the defence of the ES sample size limitation.
Furthermore, the authors also defend against this ES sample size limitation by referring to the fact that results including the ES sample showed anecdotal or stronger support for the null. Again here, there is potential for confusion as the ‘better than anecdotal’ level evidence was only for when the ES sample was combined with the larger SE sample and then compared against monolinguals. There were also a number of inconclusive comparisons (between SE and ES) regarding semantic network parameters not mentioned here in the limitations section, which should be mentioned as results which may have been limited by sample size.
In summary, I feel that this limitations sections should be revised to make more transparent which particular conclusions from the analysis were limited by this small ES sample.
Thank you for pointing this out. We agree this was unclear. The Ns are now explicitly stated in each subsection of the analyses. We also revised the limitations to be more precise about the particular conclusions affected by the small ES sample. The changes to the limitations section appear on lines 465-469 of the revised manuscript.
Additionally, there are a number of other small modifications regarding typos and general style etc:
2. The introduction section is well written, however, the section from line 1 to line 68 needs to be broken up into smaller paragraphs, as it presently appears to be a single massive one. For example, I recommend a paragraph break after “creativity” on line 14 and again after “stored” on line 28… as well as further breaks in this vein going forward.
Thank you for pointing this out. This was a mistake due to typesetting as we went through the submission process. We have broken the introduction into several paragraphs.
3. There is no author information on reference 9 (i.e. Kharkhurin, 2009 reference), also no journal information on ref 26. Please double check other references as well.
4. Please remove fullstops at the beginning of paragraphs on line 267, 279, 288, 335, 362.
Fixed. Thank you.
5. No space after fullstop on line 419 e.g. “group.This” also no space in “hypothesis,namely” on 454
Fixed. Thank you.
6. You may wish to include a recently published large sample demonstration of no general advantage of bilingualism - Nichols, E. S., Wild, C. J., Stojanoski, B., Battista, M. E., & Owen, A. M. (2020). Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: a population study of executive function in 11,000 people. Psychological Science.
Thank you for the reference -- We have added it to the manuscript in several places, including line 11.
7. I recommend rewriting the sentences containing bracketed stats in the following way, such that the bracketed stats are at the end of the phrase. This makes it far easier to read. e.g. your original was “We found substantial evidence that the ASPL (r = 0.11, BF01 = 4.65 with uniform prior, BF01 = 14.6 with directional negative prior based on Benedek et al., 2017 and Bernard, Kenett, Ovando-Tellez, Benedek & Volle, 2019 [26,59]; Fig 7a) was not correlated with creativity scores.” —> I recommend “We found substantial evidence that the ASPL was not correlated with creativity scores (r = 0.11, BF01 = 4.65 with uniform prior, BF01 = 14.6 with directional negative prior based on Benedek et al., 2017 and Bernard, Kenett, Ovando-Tellez, Benedek & Volle, 2019 [26,59]; Fig 7a). ”
Thank you for the suggestion. We agree this formatting is more clear. It has been updated in the revised manuscript on lines 375-389 (and elsewhere).
Finally, I thank the authors for their hard work and hope they are keeping well in this current stressful covid-19 situation.
We thank the reviewer for their thoughtfulness and kind thoughts. We hope the same for them.
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6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.
In a desire to be as transparent as possible, we would like to publish the peer review history of our article.
Evidence against a relation between bilingualism and creativity
PONE-D-20-03820R1
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PONE-D-20-03820R1
Evidence against a relation between bilingualism and creativity
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