A linguistic analysis of glossolalia: Evidence of unique psycholinguistic processing

Abstract

A variety of linguistic analyses of glossolalia (the religious phenomenon of “speaking in tongues”) were performed to determine both the extent to which glossolalia is language‐like and the extent to which it is linguistically dependent upon the glossolalist's native language. The results indicate the glossolalia is, in more ways than not, both language‐like and unlike the speaker's native language. These results are contrary both to earlier studies of glossolalia and to the predictions of current psycholinguistic theory. The implication is that glossolalia manifests a unique sort of speech encoding which cannot now be, but must eventually be, accounted for by psycholinguistic theory.