Category: Experimental Psychology

Can People Learn to Speak in Tongues?

The first time I ever heard anyone “speak in tongues”, defined as a seemingly miraculous occurrence of speaking in a language they had never learned, it did indeed appear miraculous as the person began speaking in tongues spontaneously with only minimal encouragement from others who were praying with them. That was in 1968 at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Seattle. I was 15 years old.

Decades later, around 2003, I listened to a Pentecostal Catholic priest not just encouraging others to speak in tongues but actually instructing them in how to do it, and also modeling this behavior by speaking in tongues himself. This experience suggested that speaking in tongues (also known as glossolalia) may, at least in some cases, be a learned behavior. Motivated by this suggestion, I went searching for any scientific evidence one way or the other. Thus, I came upon this experiment confirming that speaking in tongues can indeed be learned.

This confirmation does not mean that all instances of speaking in tongues are learned of course. Some such instances could be miraculous: as far as I know, there is no way to prove they are not.

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Transfer of Training in Memory

This research by George Cutler Fracker (yes, a relative) was written in 1908 while Psychology was still dominated by Wundt’s Structuralism, as can be seen from the reliance on introspection by a small number of experimental subjects (one of whom was the researcher). Primarily of historical interest, this article does demonstrate that the focus on cognition and memory which came into full bloom in the 1960’s and later, had its antecedents in the early history of psychology before the rise of behaviorism shut it down, temporarily as it turned out.

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