Abstract
The Remote Associate Test (RAT) of Mednick (1962) is used by numerous researchers in creativity and more generally in language. Recently, the need to understanding the cognitive processes involved when completing the RAT (e.g., Marko, Michalko & Riečanský, 2018) highlights that a French adaptation is clearly missing. In this work, we propose to provide a French version of the RAT, based on the variant earlier proposed by Bowden and Jung-Beeman (2003) in which the solution is always connected by syntagma (i.e., forms a compound word) to each word of the problem. In our study, we had considered three forms of lexical binding between compound words –the answer was either a prefix/suffix of the problem’s words and formed an unified compound word (e.g., malheureux) –or a hyphen connected one of the problem’s word to the solution (e.g., porte-bagages) –or it was a detached compound word where the word was linked to the solution by a lexical term (e.g., eau de vie). Overall, we designed 98 problems based on 294 words (adjectives and nouns) issued from French language dictionaries (e.g., Larousse). 60 participants were faced to these problems and the experiment was carried out on a computer using OpenSesame software (version 3.2.5 –Kafkaesque Koffka–Mathôt, Schreij & Theeuwes, 2012). The analysis of the results will allow us to examine the reliability of the French test. Specifically, we will pay attention to the possible role of lexical, semantic and emotional variables (i.e., valence) regarding their respective power in predicting response times and accuracy.