Linguistic Complexity and Creativity across the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Corpus Analysis

Abstract

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.