February 6, 2015

February 6, 2015 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This is a fourth writing in which this writer uses the paper “Listening is Behaving Verbally” (2008) by H.D. Schlinger to explain the importance of the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Each of these response classes “is evoked jointly under two sources of control.” When communicators begin to differentiate between SVB and NVB, they first notice that a particular sound they can produce makes one or the other happen. Although we don’t know that we are using Voice I almost all the time, we are familiar with it and don’t need to learn it. Voice II is a different matter. Voice II is new and takes time to recognize it as the voice we only produce when we are at peace. 

When this writer introduces people to Voice II, they usually just echo it back to him. In this process, he often uses a gong. By softly striking the small gong, the listener hears a sound which he or she can echo. By being tuned in to the sound of the gong, they find that they can sound like the gong while they speak. Voice I is demonstrated by putting three pins on the gong. With the pins on the gong, its sound is muffled. That is Voice I. 

Since the sound is so strikingly different when pins are on the gong or off the gong, a technical, impersonal, description soon follows the production of these two sounds. The sound of our voice during spoken communication fluctuates like when pins are on the gong or off the gong. Voice I stands for pins on the gong and Voice II stands for no pins on the gong.  We then acknowledge that in one kind of talking we speak with Voice I, but in another different kind of talking, we speak with Voice II. At that moment an individual begins to explore Voice II as a self-echoic and as a tact. 

“This type of selection response may be considered a descriptive autoclitic”, because by listening to his or her own sound, Voice II “enters into joint control with the topography currently under self-echoic rehearsal” (Lowenkron, 2006, p. 125). “A joint control account, as a form of mediated stimulus selection, has an advantage over unmediated accounts in that it is independent of the particular stimuli used” (Palmer, 2006). The difference between Lowenkron’s joint control and nonverbal conditional discrimination is that in the former, the speaker has “already well-established echoic and tact repertoires” and “becomes a speaker first by engaging in echoic and then in self-echoic behavior (evoked by the speaker’s request)”, while in the latter, reinforcement is conditional on the joint control of a speaker’s question (where is the book?) and the listener’s response (pointing). The former is a more complicated, verbal form of joint control.  

In SVB, the listener’s verbal behavior, as a speaker, is under joint control of “already well-established” positively sounding “echoic and tact repertoires” and the listener is becoming a “speaker first by engaging in” positive “echoic and then in” positive “self-echoic behavior.” In NVB, by contrast, the reinforcement of the listener as speaker is conditional on “already well-established” negative “echoic and tact repertoires.” In NVB, listeners are reinforced as speakers for nonverbal behavior (do as you are told!). Moreover, in NVB, if the listener can become a speaker, he or she first engages in negative echoic and then in negative self-echoic behavior. 

Thus, in NVB listeners listen and sound very different than in SVB. NVB listeners can’t and don’t hear the sound of speakers with SVB and SVB listeners have trouble listening to the sound of NVB speakers. In SVB listening is not a problem and therefore it is not an issue at all, but in NVB listening is always problem and an issue which is raised, but never solved.

In the section “Why do we echo?” Schlinger acknowledges that “before exposure to socially mediated reinforcement for echoing or repeating what others say, we have a history of automatic reinforcement for producing sounds that match those we’ve heard from our phonological  environment.” He then quotes Bates, O’Connell and Shore (1987), who suggest that “the role of automatic reinforcement can be inferred from the fact that the intonation and segmenting of hearing but not nonhearing infants begin to match the language of phonological environment.” No mention is made, however, of the listener’s comfort or discomfort with  such a phonological environment. Palmer (1996) refers to “this match between one’s vocal response and the phonological stimuli of the verbal community as achieving parity”, but he also doesn’t make any distinction between the phonological environments that elicit negative or positive emotions.  It is unbelievable that behaviorists like Schlinger and so many others can discuss why listeners echo without even mentioning the effect of human emotion. Naturally, before we can speak, we can only echo the emotional sounds which we hear in our phonological environment. 

The phonological environment in which children hear and echo voices of safety, comfort, reassurance, calmness, care and stability, sets the stage for SVB, but the environment in which children hear and thus mainly echo  voices of anxiety, fear, stress, frustration, anger, hopelessness, coercion, sadness and discomfort, sets the stage for NVB. Given that, by the estimation of those who have experimented with the SVB/NVB distinction approximately 95% of our conversations are NVB, it is clear that the phonological environments in which most people grow up are ones in which negative emotions are more often communicated than positive ones. As a consequence, most of us find Voice I automatically reinforcing, because we were reinforced for it. Because SVB is hardly reinforced at all, we usually don’t experience Voice II as automatically reinforcing.