August 6, 2015

August 6, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my sixth response to“Talker-specific learning in speech perception” by Nygaard and Pisoni (1998). These researchers give a good example of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) by stating that “variation” in “talker identity” is “assumed to be stripped away so that the listener can arrive at canonical representations that underlie further linguistic analysis.” 

Lack of variation and rigidity of “talker identity” goes hand in hand with "the assumption that the end product of perception is a series of abstract, symbolic, idealized, linguistic units." This assumption is from the NVB talker’s superior point of view. These authors call it “the abstractionist's approach to speech perception.” I totally agree with them that this approach, with “its emphasis on context-free processing units, falls short of providing a satisfactory explanation for the relationship between the processing of linguistic content and the analysis of a talker’s voice," by the listener.

We must focus on how the speaker sounds, because that determines if we (talkers as well as listeners) will engage in SVB or NVB. “A separate body of research has addressed the perception and identification of talker identity, viewing the speech signal as simply a carrier of talker information.” This so-called "perception" is in reality a form of dissociation in the listener. 

During NVB, the listener has no other choice than to try to separate what is said from how it is said, so that the NVB speaker can continue to dominate and intimidate him or her. If the listener would not be doing this, he or she would be punished by the speaker for not listening or for being distracted. 

However, by connecting “talker information” with listener’s perception, that is, by joining speaking and listening behavior or by listening to ourselves while we speak, we will attain SVB. These researchers should consider it to be a NVB assumption that “talker identification and perception” must involve “a distinct set of perceptual mechanisms which operate on attributes of the acoustic speech signal that are separate and autonomous from the attributes that underlie spoken word recognition of the linguistic message.”