The Topeka School

Glossolalia refers to the practice of speaking in a way that sounds like speech but is actually nonsensical. The practice is often associated with the religious practice of speaking in tongues. However, in The Topeka School, Lerner uses the concept of glossolalia to refer to any moment in which spoken language breaks down or becomes detached from meaning.

Glossolalia first appears in reference to Adam’s competitive debate. In tournaments, debaters employ the spread, a technique in which they rapidly read off more evidence than their opponents could plausibly “respond to within the given time” (22). To bolster spread, debaters speak so quickly they appear to be speaking nonsense to laypeople: “To an anthropologist or ghost […] interscholastic debate would appear less competitive speech than glossolalic ritual” (23).

Later, the results of Jonathan’s experiments on speech shadowing result in glossolalia. In the experiments, participants must repeat what they hear on a sped-up tape recording; because they are concentrating more on reproducing what they hear than its content, participants end up repeating the recording’s abstract nonsense without realizing it. Jonathan argues that the experiments reveal the inherent chaos underlying the human practice of language: “information overload [causes] the speech mechanisms to collapse” (44).