God Belief as an Innate Aspect of Human Nature: A Response to John Shook and Questions for Justin Barrett

John Shook’s article “Are People Born to be Believers, or are Gods Born to be Believed?” (this volume) critiques research findings and writings by Justin Barrett suggesting that god beliefs may be innate among human beings. In response to points raised by Shook, we first discuss several complications that need to be balanced when defining and assessing the innateness hypothesis. Second, we address the question of how both god believers and nonbelievers might have both favorable and unfavorable responses to claims of god beliefs being innate. Third, we consider whether certain additional features, besides (vague) god beliefs themselves, might be part of a human predisposition toward religious belief. We agree with Shook’s claims that researchers’ own beliefs may impact their research questions, methods, and interpretations of findings. Given the pervasive risk of blind spots and biases, we conclude by emphasizing the need for accountability, transparency, skepticism, open-mindedness, and collegiality among scholars.

Nativist versus constructivist goals in studying child language

Crain & Thornton (1998: 5) are admirably clear in stating the aims of their research programme: they ‘hope to convince a greater number of students and researchers in child language of the correctness of the Innateness Hypothesis and the theory of Universal Grammar’. As Drozd notes, however, their assumptions under Modularity Matching ‘set the stage for a research programme unlike those typically adopted by developmental psycholinguists’. Whereas C&T are avowedly committed to the continuity assumption (clearly preferring ‘special nativism’ over ‘general nativism’; O'Grady, 1997), constructivists are more interested in the question of how children ‘get from here to there’ (Tomasello, 2003) – that is, from immature levels of language comprehension and use to adultlike levels (and, it is important to note that adultlike levels are not always characterized in generativist terms). Most constructivists are also committed to studying the relations between language development and other simultaneously developing social and cognitive skills (Clark, 2003), whereas nativists tend to be interested in ‘pure’ linguistic ability uncontaminated by nonlinguistic influences. The main goal of nativists then is to verify a specific theory of linguistic competence that suggests that linguistic knowledge is innate and modular and to account for children's linguistic development in terms of UG, whereas the main goal for constructivists is to account for development (change) in the child's language system (beginning from perhaps no predetermined linguistic knowledge) and how it relates to other aspects of development. It is this fundamental difference in goals that makes one quite pessimistic that constructivist and nativist researchers in syntactic development can learn anything from one another; they are simply engaged in separate tasks.

Speech discrimination in the language-innocent and the language-wise: a study in the perception of voice onset time

ABSTRACTDiscrimination of synthetically produced stimuli differing along the voice onset time continuum was assessed for infants and adults within the context of the Visually Reinforced Infant Speech Discrimination (VRISD) paradigm. English-learning infants' discrimination abilities were compared with two groups of English-speaking adults (a phonetically naive and a phonetically sophisticated group). Contrary to the predictions of the innateness hypothesis, English-learning infants showed evidence of discrimination only across the English phoneme boundary. Adults, on the other hand, were very successful in discriminating both across and within a range of phoneme boundaries. These results are discussed in terms of the presumed relationship between categorical perception and linguistic processing and in terms of synthetic speech continua.