Revisiting the Thinking Creatively with Sounds and Words test 50 years later: Sound stimuli for assessing creative potential in childhood

The assessment of children's creativity is dominated by instruments that use stimuli and tasks of a visual or linguistic nature. Fifty years later, we revisited the Thinking Creatively with Sounds and Words (TCSW) test, Sounds and Images subtest, to analyse the originality of the mental images evoked by sound stimuli in children and to know their topography, compared with the visual-figurative creative potential through the ‘Test de Creatividad Infantil’ [Children's Creativity Test] (TCI). The study involved 310 Spanish schoolchildren (4–12 years old). Using a mixed methodology, the results of both instruments (TCSW and TCI tests) were correlated and analysed according to gender and educational stage. The impact on originality of novelty/complexity and a progressive warm-up was also examined. Finally, 3720 mental images evoked from the sound stimuli were characterised. The results show weak but significant positive correlations between the scores obtained in both instruments. Gender showed no relationship with the level of creative potential. According to the educational stage, mean scores were significantly higher in younger students. Considering gender and educational stage, overlapping typologies were identified in the most frequent images and specific profiles in the most original responses. The novelty/complexity of the sound stimuli influenced the originality of the images, whereas the effect of the progressive warm-up depended on the nature of the stimulus. The analysis of the responses showed that means of transportation was the most recurrent category. Significant differences in the responses according to gender (e.g., war sounds) and educational stage (e.g., animals) were identified.