Creative Potential in Science: Conceptual and Measurement Issues.

This paper examines the concept of creative potential as it applies in science. First, conceptual issues concerning the definition of creative potential are explored, highlighting that creative potential is a moving target, and measures of creative potential are estimates of future behavior. Then three main ways to detect creative potential are examined.

Cultural Variations in Evaluation of Creative Work: A Comparison of Russian and Emirati Samples.

The study investigates how cultural variations influence evaluation of creative work. Russian and Emirati undergraduate college students were asked to judge alien creature drawings produced by their country mates in previous studies' structured imagination test. We found cultural differences in creativity judgment.

Language Mediated Concept Activation in Bilingual Memory Facilitates Cognitive Flexibility.

This is the first attempt of empirical investigation of language mediated concept activation (LMCA) in bilingual memory as a cognitive mechanism facilitating divergent thinking. Russian-English bilingual and Russian monolingual college students were tested on a battery of tests including among others Abbreviated Torrance Tests for Adults assessing divergent thinking traits and translingual priming (TLP) test assessing the LMCA. The latter was designed as a lexical decision priming test, in which a prime and a target were not related in Russian (language of testing), but were related through their translation equivalents in English (spoken only by bilinguals).

Predicting the timing of dynamic events through sound: Bouncing balls.

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).

Perceptual confusions of American-English vowels and consonants by native Arabic bilinguals.

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).

The role of native-language phonology in the auditory word identification and visual word recognition of Russian-English bilinguals.

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 (/i/-/u/,/I/-/A/,/i/-/I/,/epsilon/-/ae/). Experiment 2 assessed auditory identification accuracy of words containing these four contrasts.