January 9, 2016

January 9, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

If you are not deaf or speech-impaired, there should be no problem for you to learn about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). However, just as Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) will condition you to remain tone-deaf for the sound of your own wellbeing it will also condition you to become speech-impaired. Characteristic for this speech impairment is the ongoing conflict between how you would like others to perceive you and how you perceive yourself. Along with this goes the usual discrepancy between what you feel and think, that is, between private, covert speech and public, overt speech. Another way of describing this conflict is the imaginary separation of the speaker and the listener. 

In NVB we are led to believe that there is such a thing as a speaker and a listener as these behaviors occur in different people who are hierarchically assigned to their different roles. In SVB, on the other hand, we find that there are neither listeners nor speakers, there is only listening and speaking behavior going on, which happens at the same response rate and simultaneously in one and the same person. 

In NVB the listener can hear that the speaker is not listening to him or herself. The sound waves produced by the NVB speaker as well as the SVB speaker are not immediately heard. The listener who is not the speaker always hears the sound waves which were produced by the speaker in the recent past. The NVB speaker, who doesn’t listen to him or herself, is listened to very differently than the speaker who listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. The latter, whose speaking and listening behaviors are synchronized, is listened to and understood effortlessly as SVB makes and keeps the communicators conscious.