Fabian Tomaschek

Glossolalia can be regarded as an instance of speech production in which practitioners produce syllables in seemingly random sequences. However, a closer inspection of glossalalia’s statistical properties reveals that sequences show a Zipfian pattern similar to natural languages, with some syllables being more probable than others. It is well established that statistical properties of sequences are implicitly learned, and that these statistical properties correlate with changes in kinematic and speech behavior. For speech, this means that more predictable items are phonetically shorter. Accordingly, we hypothesized for glossolalia that if practitioners have learned a serial pattern in glossolalia in the same manner as in natural languages, its statistical properties should correlate with its phonetic characteristics. Our hypothesis was supported. We find significantly shorter syllables associated with higher syllable probabilities in glossolalia. We discuss this finding in relation to theories about the sources of probability-related changes in the speech signal.