Normative data for Chinese compound remote associate problems

Abstract

The Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a well-known measure of creativity, with each item on the RAT is composed of three unrelated stimulus words. The participant's task is to find an answer in the form of a word that could combine with each of the stimulus words, thus forming three new actual nouns. Researchers have modified the RAT to develop compound remote associate problems that emphasize combining vocabulary to form compound words. In the field of creativity research for Mandarin speakers, the Chinese RAT has been widely applied for over 10 years. The original RAT, compound remote associate problems, and Chinese RAT have various common advantages, such as being convenient to use and having objective scoring; additionally, the development of items for certain tests is easy and satisfies the requirements of psychological assessments in terms of the quantity of items. Currently, many language editions of the RAT and compound remote associate problems already exist. In particular, the English and Italian versions of these tests already have derived normative data. Because approximately 20% of the world's population are native Mandarin speakers, and because increasing numbers of people are choosing Mandarin as a second language, the need to increase Mandarin-language resources is growing; however, normative data for the Chinese RAT still do not exist. To address this issue, in the present study we developed Chinese compound remote associate problems and analyzed the passing rates by items, problem solving times, and various normative data, using the responses of 253 subjects in three experiments.

Remote associates test: An empirical proof of concept

“…Moreover, the cue-solution relation can also vary in the degrees of abstractness (e.g., Apple-Tree vs. Humor-Sense) and figurativeness (e.g., Star-Planet vs. Star-Actress). Given that processing distinct word relations may employ different cognitive systems (Weiland, Bambini, & Schumacher, 2014;Worthen & Clark, 1971;Wu & Chen, 2017;Xiao, Zhao, Zhang, & Guo, 2012), RAT scores need not necessarily reflect a unitary and coherent cognitive ability.…”

Normative data for 102 Spanish remote associate problems and age-related differences in performance

“…As experience and knowledge increase, representations and associations between related concepts gain in complexity, favoring their semantic integration. In particular, given the decidedly verbal nature of the RAT, it is likely to depend on a certain level of verbal intelligence and the cultural knowledge shared by native speakers of the same language (Chermahini et al, 2012;Lee et al, 2014;Salvi et al, 2016;Shen et al, 2016;Wu & Chen, 2017). Vocabulary changes in quantity and quality across adolescence.…”

“…For example, the words same, tennis and head are associated with the solution (match) via synonymy (same = match); compound word formation (matchhead); and semantic association (tennis match). The inclusion of different types of associations within the same problem can affect task consistency, as pointed out by some authors (e.g., Bowden & Jung-Beeman, 2003;Marko, Michalko, & Riečanský, 2018;Wu & Chen, 2017). To address this limitation, Bowden and Jung-Beeman (2003) created a series of 144 RAT problems using only one type of associative link.…”

“…Instead, RAT problems in a particular language must take into account the specific characteristics of the chosen language's vocabulary and its colloquial conventions (Salvi, Costantini, Bricolo, Perugini, & Beeman, 2016). For this reason, the RAT has been adapted to other-language versions, including among others Chinese (Shen, Yuan, Liu, Yi, & Dou, 2016;Wu & Chen, 2017), Dutch (Chermahini, Hickendorff, & Hommel, 2012), or Italian (Salvi et al, 2016) and adapted to other cultural-contexts, such as Jamaica (Hamilton, 1982) or Spain (Romo, 1980). The adaptations usually start from the original RAT developed by Mendick, selecting only those items appropriate for their respective cultural context.…”

A Visual Remote Associates Test and Its Validation

“…A good answer to this particular query is ICE. The Remote Associates Test has been widely used in the literature (Dorfman et al, 1996;Ansburg, 2000;Ansburg and Hill, 2003;Ward et al, 2008;Cai et al, 2009;Cunningham et al, 2009). Stimuli for this test exist not just in English (Bowden and Jung-Beeman, 2003;, but also German (Landmann et al, 2014), Chinese (Shen et al, 2016;Wu and Chen, 2017), Italian (Salvi et al, 2016), Romanian (Olteţeanu et al, 2019b), etc. An approach toward generating functional RAT queries has also been proposed (Olteţeanu et al, 2019a), enhancing the repository of available RAT queries.…”