There are several reasons why belief in xenoglossia is ubiquitous. First of all, there is a concrete basis for it: glossolalia shares with human speech certain universal characteristics. It exhibits almost exclusively speech sounds, of which there is only a limited inventory in the known languages of the world: man employs only a relatively small number of those physiologically possible as speech sounds. Also, glossolalia has an alternation of consonants and vowels, and it has accent, pauses, final contours, intonation. Purely as a matter of statistical probability, some consonant-vowel combinations occurring in a glossolalia utterance may also be a meaningful unit in some language. Thus sio could be French (old objective case of sire), veni, Latin. Word fragments might on occasion be swept over into glossolalia, from Spanish ven (come) in the latter case, or the former from the frequently repeated sellame, sellame. …
…In addition to the above factors deriving from the sound track, there is also operative a number of psychological factors, I think. Foremost among them is the manner which people react to anomalous data, how they cope with incongruities. In a psychological experiment carried out in 1949, J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were anomalous, that is, a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Soon all subjects identified all the cards correctly, except that the anomalous cards were almost always, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, identified as normal. Listeners to tongue-speaking go through a similar process: they fit the audiosignal into a previously prepared category, namely language.
Goodman, Felicitas D. Speaking in Tongues A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972) 150-151
No comments:
Post a Comment