The main focus of this chapter is to evaluate the relevance of the hypotheses specified at the end of Chapter 4. The results indicate that the influence of individual indicators/subscores on creative performance cannot be determined as a single general conclusion because it varies in relation to the opposition between and/or the role of (i) different age groups; (ii) the individual creativity indicators/subscores; (iii) word-formation versus word-interpretation; (iv) the individual word-formation criteria; (v) the individual word-interpretation criteria; (vi) the nature of the tasks included in the word-formation test; (vi) the nature of word-formation processes underlying the interpretation test. By implication, there are a number of factors that, in their mutual interaction, affect the influence of creative potential through its individual creativity indicators/subscores upon creative performance in forming and interpreting new/potential complex words. Therefore, the only way to determine this influence is to assess each aspect of word-formation and word-interpretation creativity independently of one another.

This chapter analyzes the research data at several levels: (i) word-formation creativity and word-interpretation creativity; (ii) two age-based groups of respondents; (iii) separate evaluations with regard to the individual creativity indicators and subscores in order to find out whether they boost creativity and, if so, which of them does so; this question is examined with regard to (a) the low cohort (L-cohort) and the high cohort (H-cohort) as well as with regard to all respondents wherever applicable; (b) the individual evaluation parameters, that is, the naming strategies, reflected in the preference for economy of expression or semantic transparency, and the number of failed answers in the word-formation test; the Predictability Rate, the Objectified Predictability Rate; the average number of readings proposed by a cohort member; and hapax legomena in the interpretation test; (c) the individual experimental words; (iv) the two age groups of respondents; (v) the male and the female groups of respondents for each of the aforementioned criteria.

Our research pursues an answer to the question of the influence of the general creative potential upon the creative performance in coining and interpreting new complex words. This chapter presents fundamental views, theories, and principles of the concept of creativity and because creative potential has been studied and evaluated by various psychological methods, we provide a general overview of various aspects of approaches to creativity from the psychological point of view. Attention is devoted to various methods used for the study and evaluation of creativity. Special focus is on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking because it is crucial to our research. This is followed by a critical overview of various approaches to the concept of linguistic creativity, and more specifically, to word-formation and word-interpretation creativity. This chapter introduces our approach that relies on (i) an onomasiological theory of word-formation (ii) an onomasiological theory of meaning predictability, and (iii) a theory of competition in word-formation and word-interpretation.

This chapter considers types of word formation that are not found in English and languages that might be more familiar to students. We look at infixation, circumfixation and parasynthesis, internal stem change (ablaut and consonant mutation), reduplication (full and partial), templatic (root and pattern) morphology, and subtractive processes. Students are introduced to techniques for analyzing morphological data in languages that may be unfamiliar to them.

In this chapter we consider more closely what we mean by a word. We begin by contrasting the differences between the mental lexicon and dictionaries. We then introduce students to the methods and techniques that psycholinguists use for studying the mental lexicon. We look at reaction time experiments, brain imaging, and the ways in which we can study individuals with aphasia and genetic disorders that affect lexical knowledge. Students are introduced to how children acquire morphology. We then look at English past tense morphology in the context of the ‘storage versus rules’ debate, considering what experimentation, brain imaging, and the study of aphasia and genetic disorders tell us about this controversy. The chapter ends with a brief history of dictionaries.

This chapter begins with the basics of affixation, including the types of morphemes that are commonly found in English (prefixes, suffixes, bound bases, formatives, extenders). Students learn to formulate word formation rules, to represent the internal structure of complex words with tree structures, and to understand difficulties that arise in segmenting words. The chapter also considers the range of meanings that derivational affixes can express. It includes a section on compounding that considers the difficulties in defining what a compound is, the notion of headedness, and the types of compounds that are common in English. The chapter also briefly considers minor types of word formation such as backformation, blending, acronyms, initialisms, and coinage. Students are taught to use corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English to find their own morphological data.

This chapter gives brief descriptions of six different contemporary theories of morphology, looking at their philosophical bases, their main concerns and leading questions, and where they stand on the balance between storage versus rules and on the status of the morpheme. The theories we consider are Distributed Morphology (DM), Construction Morphology (CxM), Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM), Natural Morphology (NM), Naïve Discriminative Learning (NDL), and the Lexical Semantic Framework (LSF).