I am in the process of reading a study on creativity and semantic distance. A McGill University newsroom article on it is here. The concept is fairly simple - more creative people will find connections between words that general usage would indicate are “less” connected. “Cat” and “dog” have the feeling of being “related” words. “Cat” and “test tube” feel like “more unrelated” words. Efforts have been done (see the study link) on measuring the “relatedness” of words by crawling the internet and measuring how close the word pairs are to each other in normal usage.