July 6, 2015

July 6, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my third response to “Sound on the rebound: bringing form and function back to the forefront in understanding nonhuman primate vocal signaling” by Owren and Rendall (2001). Constructs such as “meaning, reference and semanticity” have not improved the way in which human beings speak. These inferences have distracted us from how we sound while we speak. This is why, to this very day, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is more common than Sound Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

If we were to pay attention to how we sound while we speak, we would find out that we are often aversively influencing each other. Our crowded environments demand that we get better at communication so that we can tolerate each other’s proximity. 

Young primates don’t respond to alarm calls with predator-specific escape behavior, but attacks and alarm calls become paired due to classical conditioning and thus they learn. Study of primate vocalizations is useful as it stimulates us to figure out how we influence each other with our vocal verbal behavior. 

It is practical to focus on how speaker vocalizations directly or indirectly influence the behavior of the listener.  What can be learned from primates is that “information encoding and transmission cannot be taken literally as explanation" and, therefore, "the critical issue becomes whether or not that notion has value as a conceptual tool.” 

Separate investigation of sender and receiver, which is inspired by the notion that animals “may or may not have coincident fitness interest in any given situation” should not distract from the common, but easily overlooked fact that when there is “coincident fitness interest,” we are dealing with nonverbal instances of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), but when there is no "coincident fitness interest", we are dealing with instances of nonverbal versions of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

Once the distinction between SVB and NVB is known, it becomes  clear that the “conflation” of “senders and receivers” is not a consequence of “metaphorical constructs”, but of the author's wish to identify “cooperative behavior.” When we view their use of “metaphorical constructs” in terms of SVB and NVB, we readily discover that their bias was a function SVB.