This study is aimed at examining the possible effect of bilingualism on creativity in nonmathematical and mathematical problem solving among very young bilingual and monolingual preschoolers. An additional factor that has been considered in this study is the form of bilingual education. Accordingly, three groups of children (mean age = 45.4 months at the beginning of the study) participated in this study: (a) 13 bilingual children from a bilingual (Hebrew–Russian) kindergarten, (b) 10 bilingual children from a monolingual (Hebrew) kindergarten, and (c) 14 monolingual children (Hebrew) from a monolingual kindergarten. All children performed the Picture Multiple Solution task on general creativity and the Creating Equal Number task on mathematical creativity. The results reveal that both early bilingualism and some form of bilingual education seem to influence the children’s general and mathematical creativity. Moreover, differences between bilingual children from the bilingual kindergarten and monolingual children were more prominent (in favor of the bilinguals). In addition, the findings confirm the hypothesis concerning the differences between two types of creative ability in the context of bilingual and monolingual development.

This study employed the masked-priming paradigm [Forster and Davis (J Exp Psychol bearn Mem Cogn 10: 680-698, 1984).], along with traditional methods of evaluation of morphological awareness and phonological processing, to obtain a finer-grained picture of the relationship between morphological abilities and reading in adult dyslexic readers. Participants were 21 dyslexic and 21 normally reading native Hebrew-speaking male college students. The results with masked priming demonstrated almost normal status of morphological knowledge in adult dyslexic readers with the presence of characteristic processing slowness. Phonological processing and morphological awareness were also shown to contribute primarily to word decoding in the regular and dyslexic group alike. At the same time, the contribution of different phonological skills to morphological priming effects (for pattern and root) dropped to zero. The findings demonstrated that weakness of dyslexic readers in morphological awareness tasks cannot be explained either by hypotheses on the structural deficit of morphological knowledge in dyslexia or by phonological deficit hypotheses. The explanation for this phenomenon seems to lie in the specific deficit of morphological processing, or even, more generally, in metalinguistic processing deficiency in dyslexia.

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