July 21, 2015

July 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is the thirteenth writing which includes findings that were reported by the animal researchers Owren and Rendall in their paper “An affect conditioning model of nonhuman primate vocal signaling” (1997).

“The affect-conditioning model suggests that nonhuman primate vocalizations need not have “meaning” in the sense of transmitting referential information from a sender to a receiver.” 

Research on nonhuman primates brings us in touch with “the central role of affect” in vocal production. This makes us pay attention to how we as humans sound while we speak. By studying “monkey and ape sounds” researchers have found, however, that although they are “homologous to spontaneous human emotional vocalizations” they “have little relation to spoken language.” Nevertheless, we can learn a valuable lesson from this research on primates: by paying attention to how they sound, we begin to recognize that they are influencing each other affectively. If we would pay attention to how we sound, we would find out why and how we are influencing each other emotionally while we speak with our voice. 

Moreover, we would only do so if we would recognize that how we sound has “little relation to spoken language.” We would only be inclined to pay attention to how we sound, if we are not too overly concerned about what we say. If all the attention goes to what we say, we get carried away by words and we don’t really listen to ourselves while we speak. Our sound of our voice changes as function of us being fixated on our words. 

The authors note that “Darwin argued for close connections between animal calling and the internal states that today might be called arousal, motivation, and emotion—which we will here collectively refer to as affect.” Think for a moment: to what extent does a person’s tone of voice arouse us to speak or to listen? What does we sound like when we motivate, encourage and support others to speak or to listen? And, what does someone’s voice make us feel, and thus talk and listen like?