August 2, 2015

August 2, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my second response to the paper “Talker-specific learning in speech perception” by L.C. Nygaard and D.B. Pisoni (1998). Another result obtained by these researchers “showed that learning a talker’s voice from sentences did not generalize well to identification of novel isolated words.” 

We are not used to hearing only isolated words, but we are used to hearing sentences. Words by themselves don’t give us the opportunity to learn the talker’s voice. Thus, in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the talker demands with as few words as possible what he or she wants, there is, due to this coercive influence, no opportunity to learn the talker’s voice, even if whole sentences are spoken. Actually, in NVB the listeners are distracted from the talker’s voice, because what he or she is saying is supposedly more important than how he or she is saying it. 

NVB speakers coerce the listener. They make the listener listen to him or to her, but they are not listening to themselves and are not stimulated to do so. Depending on what kind of voice the talker has there will be aversive or appetitive effects for the listener. Although this research investigated the listener’s ability to learn the talker’s voice, it still focused mainly on content and not on how the speaker sounded. 

Fixation on the verbal is typical for NVB in which we basically ignore the nonverbal forms of conditioning. The researchers focus on novel isolated words is antithetical to Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), in which the speaker hears his or her own voice and thus is and remains his or her own listener. 

The overemphasized importance of being able to recognize these novel isolated words indicates that there is an aversive environment in which this urgent need arises. However, such a need doesn’t arise in an appetitive environment which is created and maintained by the SVB speaker. Thus,  learning the SVB speaker’s voice from sentences generalizes better to novel isolated words than learning the NVB speaker’s voice from sentences.