Language minority children's linguistic and cognitive creativity

Abstract

In the southwestern United States thousands of children enter the schooling process as language minority speakers of Spanish. This paper discusses findings from an empirical investigation of the effects of bilingualism on the linguistic and cognitive creativity of language minority children proficiently bilingual in Spanish and English. Specifically, it addresses the cognitive processes of divergent and convergent thinking and the linguistic process of metaphorising in the ‘ context of formulating scientific hypotheses. Together the linguistic and cognitive processes are viewed as manifesting aspects of a common underlying creativity. Subjects were sixth‐grade students, age 11, in two intact classrooms, one with monolingual English‐speaking majority children and the other with Spanish‐English bilingual minority children. Both groups participated in an inquiry‐based science programme during which they learned to formulate scientific hypotheses in a problem‐solving setting. Written hypotheses generated by the children provided the data‐base. On measures of hypothesis quality, syntactic and semantic linguistic variables, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals. The qualitatively high scientific hypotheses expressed by the language minority children using complex metaphoric language in their second language, English, indicate that linguistic and cognitive creativity is enhanced by bilingual language proficiency.