Falar mais de uma língua pode aumentar a criatividade? Um estudo cognitivo sobre o impacto do bilinguismo na atenção e na cratividade

Abstract

This dissertation investigated the impact of bilingualism in attention and creativity from the perspective of cognition, from a sample of 50 men and women, between 20 and 49 years living in the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul (RS). Half of the sample was composed of 23 speakers of brazilian portuguese (BP) and pomeranian; 1 speaker of BP and german and 1 speaker of BP, german and pomeranian. The other half consisted of 25 monolingual of BP. Foreign studies in this area - most carried out with bilingual of majority languages - have shown bilingual advantage in overall cognitive performance, especially in creativity, but these studies evaluated the creativity only in terms of cognitive, contrary to the purpose of this study, which evaluated the creativity as affective and cognitive characteristics, established by Torrance (1965). In this present study we investigated whether the unwritten bilingual minority languages, as the pomeranian - the other spoken language, other than the BP, the bilinguals in this study, is likely to provide the same cognitive benefits supposedly provided by the bilingualism of majority languages. We expected that bilingual adults that speak the unwritten language and BP, and monolingual of BP, comparable in terms of socioeconomic status (SES), educational and functional, in the same geographical and social context, provided evidence of very similar mean scores compared to the performance in attention and creativity. This hypothesis was corroborated because although the bilingual show a tendency to overcome monolingual in mean scores on the creativity and sustained attention, and on the other hand, a monolingual trend to overcome the bilingual performance of divided attention, there was no statistics significance, and the mean scores of the groups remained very close, in these skills. We selected two tests, internationally recognized and adapted for use in the Brazilian population, to see sustained attention (Colors Trails Test (CTT) - form 1); divided attention (CTT - form 2) and creativity (Torrance Test). The results of this study were discussed based on the Dynamic Systems Theory, considering the characteristics of the unwritten spoken minority languages in the world, especially in Brazil, enphasizing the interaction elements of differents dimensions in determining the impact of bilingualism in attention and creativity.