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- Jul 19, 2004
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I'm not exactly a linguist, but I think there would be some kind of discernible structure to the sound of a real language that would be lacking in just gibberish. A more complex structure indicating grammar and word forms.
Such structural features (e.g., lexical consistency; syntactic coherence) can't be evaluated without a substantial corpus of spoken or written expression to analyze. Such substantial samples aren't typically available.
Another problem is that identifying words and assigning meanings requires finding connections between the spoken utterances and patterns or objects of reference. Episodes of glossolalia are often performed as if in a trance-like state, in which the speaker is basically passive and not behaving in a manner to indicate how uttered sounds might correlate with concepts or objects.