The Relation Between Verbal Intelligence and Creative Potential
Creativity tasks in developmental psychology research tend to rely on verbal ability to communicate ideas. These verbal demands might make it difficult for a child to receive accurate creativity scores because of the unclear relation between verbal intelligence and creativity. This study aims to investigate the relation between verbal intelligence and creative potential. Four- and six-year old typically developing children (N = 84) were recruited to complete the Draw a Pretend Person task for creativity and the Stanford-Binet Routing Subtests for verbal and nonverbal intelligence. Session transcripts of the Draw a Pretend Person Task were analyzed for the number of nouns, verbs, and adjectives used, as well as mean length of utterance. Results indicated that, above and beyond nonverbal intelligence, both noun total (B = 0.346, p <0.01) and verb total (B = 0.325, p <0.01) were associated with higher creativity ratings; however verbal intelligence overall and mean length of utterance were not (ps = 0.498 and 0.078, respectively). These results indicate that children are able to better express creativity related to their increased vocabulary, but additional analysis will examine ratios of speech and vocabulary to better understand whether this is related to how talkative a child is.