Beliefs about unobservable scientific and religious entities are transmitted via subtle linguistic cues in parental testimony

We explored the role of parental testimony in the development of young children’s beliefs in the ontological status of typically unobservable phenomena. US parents and their 5- to 7-year-old children (N = 25 dyads) separately rated their confidence in the existence of scientific and religious unobservable entities (e.g., germs, angels), and were invited to engage in an unmoderated dyadic conversation about the entities. Both parents and children were more confident in the existence of the scientific entities compared to the religious entities. Parental religiosity significantly predicted the strength of their belief in the religious entities, and these beliefs were positively associated with their children’s ontological judgements in the religious domain. We coded parental testimony during the unmoderated conversation for a number of subtle linguistic cues that convey their confidence and prevailing beliefs in an entity’s existence. The results revealed consistent cross-domain differences: parents expressed more uncertainty, were more likely to mention variation in people’s beliefs and make explicit claims about the ontological status of the religious, as compared to the scientific entities. However, parents who were more religious produced fewer cues to uncertainty, mentioned belief variation less often when talking about the religious unobservables, and, when discussing ontological status, were more likely to explicitly affirm their existence. Importantly, the pattern of linguistic cues in parental testimony was significantly associated with children’s ontological judgements. The present findings have implications for understanding the socio-cultural mechanisms by which confidence in the existence of invisible agents and processes develops in childhood.

The Motivation for Roots in Distributed Morphology

Within Distributed Morphology, it has been proposed that the lexical vocabulary consists of Roots: category-less primitives. The motivation for Roots is connected with a line of argument reaching back to Chomsky concerning the representation of lexical categories and their role in syntax. At the center of the theory of Roots is the Two Domains Intuition: the idea that there are two different types of domains in which grammatical interactions (form: allomorphy; meaning: allosemy) occur. Roots are posited as part of an argument against lexicalist approaches to the Two Domains Intuition that reduce it to a modular distinction between the lexicon and the syntax. In place of the modular distinction, Root-based approaches hypothesize that domain differences are derivative of syntactic locality effects in a way that connects with the phase theory of Minimalist syntax. This review examines developments leading to current versions of a Roots-and-contexts theory. A particular focus is on the idea that separating lexical Roots from the morphemes that categorize them is essential to defining the distinct locality domains that are posited to explain the effects subsumed under the Two Domains Intuition. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 7 is January 14, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The siren song of aesthetics? Domain differences and creativity in engineering and design

For many years, researchers have debated the role of “domain” in creativity. Opinion remains divided, but a common view is that creativity is a combination of domain-general elements, coupled with domain-specific manifestations, usually in the form of different kinds of products. Discussions of domains and creativity frequently take place in very broad, thematic terms, differentiating only between Arts and Sciences, with less attention given to differences within domains. The goal of this paper is to explore a single technological domain, studying differences between the micro-domains of Engineering and Industrial Design. Do engineers and industrial designers differ when evaluating the creativity of products? If they differ, what might be the underlying drivers of these differences? Contrary to expectations, not only were there significant differences between these groups, but evidence presented in this study suggests that engineers have difficulty differentiating between aesthetics and functionality, as components of product creativity, in contrast to industrial designers, who seem to possess a more discriminating eye.