Creativity is a Toaster: Experimental Evidence on How Multilinguals Process Novel Metaphors

This article investigates the connection between multilingual experiences and creative metaphoric competence. As multilingualism has been shownto bring cognitive advantages in creative thinking, this article explores whether the ability to interpret creative metaphors differs in participants with less versus more multilingual experience. The results of a self-paced reading study combined with a sensicality judgment showed that people with less versus more multilingual experience process metaphors evaluated as being (i) less or (ii) more creative quite similarly in terms of reading times; however, the groups differ significantly in their judgments of semantic sensicality for the more creative metaphors. Although in the case of less creative metaphors groups do not differ, in the case of more creative metaphors, people with more multilingual experience are more likely to say that the metaphor makes sense. We interpret these findings as showing that people with more multilingual experience access the nonsalient semantic features of the concepts compared in the metaphor with less effort and can employ richer semantic representations, which complements previous research on multilingualism and cognitive flexibility.