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Paul de Lacy Colloquium

Paul de Lacy
Rutgers

Preliminaries to a theory of glossolalia

Friday, April 6, 3:30 pm, Machmer E-37

Abstract

'Glossolalia' refers to certain spontaneous utterances with no semantic content. Glossolalia is most famously practiced by religious adherents of certain Christian religions (called 'speaking in tongues'), but is also practiced in other religions, and even for relaxation and artistic performance.

This talk will report about an ongoing study of glossolalia. I will propose that glossolalia is a "targetless L2" -- it uses the same cognitive resources as a second language but does not have any external input (unlike normal L2s). I will discuss the implications of this theory of glossolalia for theories of second language acquisition and markedness.