The current study investigated the language behaviour of older adults before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Linguistic complexity (LC)—a measure of lexical and morpho-syntactic richness—is an index of both cognitive functioning and creativity. The increased physical and social isolation during the pandemic yielded reports of heightened levels of creativity as well as cognitive decline, bringing forth two counter-directed predictions: (1) given the threat to cognitive functioning posed by the pandemic, LC may steadily decrease following the onset of the pandemic, or; (2) consistent with the creativity boost reported during lockdowns, LC may be greater after the onset of the pandemic. This work analyzed the syntactic and lexical complexity of texts from the CoSoWELL corpus (v1.0), a collection of personal narratives written by 1028 mature adults (55+) collected at five test sessions spanning before (t1) and after (t2-t5) the beginning of the pandemic. Two lexical variables (type-token ratio; noun-verb ratio) and six syntactic variables (two syntactic variants of type-token ratio; embeddedness; D-ratio; longest dependency path; mean length utterance) were used to calculate LC. All measures saw statistically significant gains from t1 to t2, and further increased across subsequent test sessions. These findings confirmed the second hypothesis and, I argue, support a pandemic-related boost to creativity. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / The COVID-19 pandemic has been isolating, and isolation is a mixed bag: being alone promotes self-reflection and overthinking, and doing too much is linked to stress and mental illness. However, more time spent in solitude is also linked to greater creativity. Creativity means more new ideas, which come through as longer, more detailed sentences, with less repetition. This research looked at stories by older adults about their lives, written before and during the pandemic. Surprisingly, the language in the stories became more descriptive and diverse over time—meaning people were being more creative after COVID-19 hit. In the wake of this lonely storm, one silver lining has emerged: whether in spite of or because of this pandemic, creativity is flourishing.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/27860 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Karabin, Megan Frances |
| Contributors | Kuperman, Victor, Cognitive Science of Language |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Video |
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