February 27, 2016

February 27, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In “Verbal Understanding and Pavlovian Processes” by Tonneau (2004) the author states that “Verbal understanding has not been explained convincingly with Skinner’s (1957, 1969) traditional operant framework.” Indeed, Skinner never mentioned what will one day be considered the two most important response classes: Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB)! These universal response classes have not been accounted for, because “verbal understanding, which concerns the behavior of the listener (Parrot, 1984, 1987)has been neglected or addressed in a deficient fashion.” 

When we are being told that “swimming in the river is dangerous” or “the pie is delicious”, we may “avoid swimming” or “order a slice” because “exposure to an organized set of verbal stimuli (including words such as “river” or “pie”) later leads to a change of behavior with respect to their nonverbal referents.” As we can tact the words “river” and “pie” the aforementioned remarks effortlessly lead us avoid danger and order that delicious pie. We are familiar with such immediate changes in nonverbal behavior due to verbal messages. 

Since we don’t know the terms SVB and NVB, we don’t pay attention to how good it feels to have SVB or how terrible it feels to have NVB. The reason we don’t differentiate between these response classes is because we don’t listen to how we sound while we speak. If we would listen to how we sound while we speak, SVB and NVB would become apparent. The purpose of this writing is to make us listen to how we sound while we speak. The instruction is repeated a couple of times as this will shape the behavior of speaker-as-own-listener. 

Tonneau states“There is a great difference between “directly reinforced” and “derived behavioral functions.” He writes “until recently, basic behavior-analytic research dealt almost exclusively with the former case, the study of which (Skinner, 1938) was taken as a model for the explanation of verbal behavior (Skinner, 1957).” 

Considering the aforementioned difference that Tonneau is trying to address it is no wonder that the distinction between SVB and NVB was never mentioned in behaviorist literature as most behaviorists have mainly focused on “directly reinforced” behavioral functions. 

As SVB and NVB are best explained by Pavlovian processes, they fall into the category of “derived” behavioral functions. More precisely, “The response distribution observed conditionally on A arises from reinforcement in the presence of stimulus B distinct from A (and entertains no formal similarity with A)(italics added).” In other words, the “response distribution observed conditionally on A arises from reinforcement in the presence of stimulus B distinct from A” as it can be traced back to the history of the nonverbal stimuli that were experienced by the listener during his or her spoken communication. 

We accept NVB as normal since we were often in environments in which it was reinforced, but we will consider it as abnormal once we have been more often in environments in which SVB is reinforced.

Once we can tact these universal response classes, we can finally call a spade a spade as we then differentiate between genuine and pretentious communication. When we have been introduced to the SVB/NVB distinction we realize that SVB is “functionally equivalent” to the communication in which the speaker has an appetitive effect on the listener and NVB is “functionally equivalent” to the interaction in which the speaker has an aversive, coercive effect on the listener. 

I have pointed out this distinction to all of my students and can tell you without any trace of doubt that “the functional equivalence between verbal stimuli and their referents” is as solid as a rock. Students tell me again and again their exploration and knowledge of the SVB/NVB distinction has positively changed and continues to change their lives.  The construct gives meaning to experiences they previously couldn’t understand. Like Tonneau, I think that Pavlovian conditioning can answer the important question “what produces the functional equivalence of verbal stimuli and their referents?” Verbal stimuli of the speaker have a sound that always affects the listener. 

The speaker who induces SVB in the listener has a voice which is distinctively different from the speaker who induces NVB. The stimulus which sets the stage for SVB is Voice II and the stimulus which sets the stage for NVB is Voice I. Unless we are able to discriminate, decrease and, ideally, completely extinguish the latter, we cannot explore the former. As this was never our objective, we have not been able to achieve this. However, with the SVB/NVB distinction in place, this is an achievable, replicable and tremendously enjoyable objective. 

The functional equivalence of SVB and Voice II and NVB and Voice I  becomes apparent when speakers are stimulated to listen to their voice while they speak. When this happens, Voice I is described as threatening or imposing by the listener, but Voice II is experienced as comforting and soothing. Of course, each listener is changed by the extent to which he or she has been exposed to Voice I or Voice II.

“Another way to develop a non-mediational, Pavlovian account of verbal understanding is to adopt a direct-memory standpoint (e.g. Marr, 1983) and replace covert mediators by features of the environment defined over an extended time scale (Tonneau, 2001, pp. 21-23)”. “Understanding a language” not only “requires a history of correlation, however indirect, between components of this language and the nonverbal world”, it requires in my opinion SVB. “Absent such grounding, no verbal understanding would be possible (Staats & Staats, 1959.” I insist that our NVB always impairs and in the worst case, completely prevents our language development. 

“Extending behavioral effects from one stimulus to another (or promoting functional equivalence) is basically what Pavlovian conditioning does.” We have yet to acknowledge that in NVB the listener will pair the noxious-sounding speaker with the unequal, uni-directional relationship in which the speaker forces the listener, while in SVB, the listener will pair the good-sounding speaker with equal, , bi-directional relationship in which the speaker takes turns with the listener. NVB and SVB are described by the listener as the difference between when the speaker is talking_at or talking_with the listener. 

  

Tonneau states that “A Pavlovian account of verbal understanding must assume that human behavior is sensitive to pairings between verbal and nonverbal stimuli, but also to pairings between verbal stimuli and relational properties of the environment (such as the property to-the-left-of), and to pairings between syntactical relations among words and such environmental properties.” I urge people to focus on the pairings between how they sound and what they say. The former is a nonverbal stimulus and the latter is a verbal stimulus. 

This paring of stimuli is apparent in SVB as the pleasant-sounding voice of the speaker goes together with a sense of wellbeing that can only be experienced when verbal and nonverbal stimuli are aligned and when there is a connection between the speaker and the listener which is maintained by turn-taking. In NVB, by contrast, a very different kind of pairing occurs. In NVB, the noxious-sounding voice of the speaker is paired with the absence of turn-taking and the lack of contact between the speaker and the listener due to the separation of the speaker and the listener. Indeed, the NVB speaker presumably is hierarchically above the listener and such a speaker’s voice is always paired with the experience of social inequality. 

When the listener is given permission to speak by the NVB speaker, he or she is only allowed to do so with a submissive sound. The NVB speaker immediately shows the listener, who becomes a speaker, his or her place, when such a speaker speaks in what is called a wrong, impolite or disrespectful tone of voice. The argument that operant processes are more complex than respondent processes is false. This becomes especially clear when we explore the SVB/NVB distinction. 

We can engage in SVB only as long as the speaker’s voice is not perceived as an aversive stimulus by the listener. SVB is a much more complex and refined phenomenon than NVB. The bluntness of NVB is paired with a certain tone of voice, while the fine-grained precision and focus of SVB can only be achieved and maintained by a voice that sounds good to the listener. “The complexity of a phenomenon is no argument against its being governed by Pavlovian processes.”

Tonneau writes “Clearly, words and their nonverbal referents often fail to be functionally equivalent. Yet, the most central features of verbal understanding seem to require function transfer from nonverbal to verbal stimuli and vice-versa.” Lack of such “transfer from nonverbal to verbal stimuli and vice-versa” is due to NVB, the way of talking which can’t facilitate such a transfer. Only the SVB speaker moves flexibly between nonverbal and verbal stimuli. 

NVB speakers are always fixated on verbal stimuli. Moreover, they force the listener to disconnect from their nonverbal experience. “It should be possible to increase the degree of functional equivalence between words and objects by providing behavioral supports and manipulating contextual stimuli.” SVB does exactly that; what we say is easier to be understood due to how we say it. It is the voice of the speaker which provides behavioral support for the listener and thus increases “the degree of functional equivalence.” 

In NVB there is no support for the listener coming from the speaker. The NVB speaker owns the contingency and forces the listener into submission. Thus, meaning is dictated by the NVB speaker. It should be noted here that the NVB speaker doesn’t even have the skill to “explain how verbal stimuli themselves acquire meaning.” The NVB speaker is per definition completely oblivious of how his or her own verbal stimuli correlate to the nonverbal environment, to the listener, as he or she is NOT listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. 

Without “Pavlovian processes verbal stimuli would be meaningless”, but as long as NVB continues, the issue of meaning remains out of our hearing range. My response to Tonneau should make behavior analysist think about why they “spent an enormous time studying operant reinforcement”, but have ignored non-operant reasons? Due to NVB, which is as high among non-behaviorists as behaviorists, behaviorists adhered to “a science of behavior” that “is like a one-sided coin”; radical behaviorism only “focuses on the maintenance of responding by its consequences, but does not examine the provenance of the responses that reinforcement maintains.” 

The SVB/NVB distinction, which, once acknowledged, will reliably increase SVB and decrease NVB, allows us to explore and explain “complex behavioral phenomena, such as verbal understanding,” which “require complex principles of induction.” Without knowing what sets the stage for SVB and NVB, we could not make progress in our investigation of “principles of behavioral induction that address the origins of novel environment-behavior relations (Stemmer, 2002).” 

This lopsidedness of behavior analysis, to primarily focus on operant processes, comes as no surprise to me. I have argued all along that if the SVB/NVB distinction is acknowledged then behaviorism will gain a more scientific status. Although Skinner has talked about “ostensive learning” (Skinner, 1957) most behavior analysists tenaciously steer away from the Pavlovian processes. However, Skinner never pointed out that if we listen to ourselves while they speak then we achieve SVB, but if nothing stimulates us to listen to ourselves while we speak, we are bound to engage in NVB. The high response rates of NVB account for the behaviorist’s denial of the place of respondent processes in verbal behavior. There is a logical reason for that. 

When someone like me points out the difference between SVB and NVB behaviorists take this personal as it is personal. The SVB/NVB distinction can be pointed out only in a genuine conversation and most behaviorists have no time for that. The acknowledgment that the Pavlovian processes may play a bigger role in the conditioning of verbal behavior than previously thought threatens existing beliefs. 

The SVB/NVB distinction exposes the fact that even most behaviorists unfortunately engage in coercive NVB public speech. How can we acquire a satisfactory account of our verbal behavior if we don’t even know that we as speakers aversively affect the listener? All the things associated with SVB and NVB, such as positive and negative emotions, jump at us once we begin to listen to ourselves while we speak. If students in my college class can do this, there is no reason why behaviorists can’t do it and improve their verbal understanding.