What is creative in childhood writing? Computationally measured linguistic characteristics explain much of the variance in subjective human-rated creativity scores

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Kandemirci, Birsu; Beaty, Roger E.; Johnson, Dan; Oliver, Bonamy R.; Kovas, Yulia and Toivainen, Teemu. 2025. What is creative in childhood writing? Computationally measured linguistic characteristics explain much of the variance in subjective human-rated creativity scores. Learning and Individual Differences, 118, 102626. ISSN 1041-6080 [Article]

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2025.102626

Abstract or Description

The present study investigated the extent to which linguistic features of children's stories (analysed using automated techniques), predicted human-rated Creative Expressiveness and Logic scores (both assessed with the Consensual Assessment Technique). A sample of 160 children (Mage = 8.99 years, SD = 0.3) wrote stories based on three pictures. Eleven linguistic characteristics were measured: Length, Grammar, Originality, Controlled Lexical Diversity, Uncontrolled Lexical Diversity, Divergent Semantic Integration (DSI), Referential Cohesion, Narrativity, Syntactic Simplicity, Word Concreteness and Deep Cohesion. The results showed that 51 % of the variance in Creative Expressiveness was explained by Length, DSI, Originality, Grammar, and Controlled Lexical Diversity (sr2 = 0.01 to 0.14). In comparison, 28 % of the variance in Logic scores was accounted for by DSI, Grammar, Controlled Lexical Diversity, Syntactic Simplicity, and Narrativity (sr2 = 0.01 to 0.06). These findings offer insights for educational practices by identifying the linguistic characteristics relevant to children's creative writing as opposed to logical narration.

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Article

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2025.102626