January 16, 2016

January 16, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

One occasional instance of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is not going to make much of a difference. One moment of Voice II, the discriminative stimulus and the consequences of SVB, such as happier relationships and a decrease of problem behaviors and an increase of effective behaviors, cannot prove the validity of this functional relationship.  Only experimentation can give us confidence in the reliability of these functional relations. Moreover, this experimentation must start with self-experimentation and then proceed to other-experimentation. 

First, you must talk out loud and listen to yourself while you speak, all by yourself. This is when you find and explore that you have a sound which is automatically reinforcing. Once you know that you can have SVB on your own, new opportunities to learn reveal themselves as you are now paying attention to the speaker-as-own-listener. By joining and synchronizing your listening and speaking behavior while you speak, you realize that the merging of observing and producing responses seldom happens while you were talking with others, but each time it happened, it produced positive consequences. 

When you are able to share your self-experimentation SVB experience with others, you will have achieved a transformational behavioral cusp. You will know from your self-experimentation, what is needed to make SVB happen in others. Although learning how to listen and how to speak happened independently under influence of special contingencies, your self-experimentation will reveal to you the unique contingency which is needed to link and unite these separately learned behaviors. In SVB speaking and listening happen at the exact same rate of responding.