February 6, 2015

February 6, 2015 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This is a fourth writing in which this writer uses the paper “Listening is Behaving Verbally” (2008) by H.D. Schlinger to explain the importance of the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Each of these response classes “is evoked jointly under two sources of control.” When communicators begin to differentiate between SVB and NVB, they first notice that a particular sound they can produce makes one or the other happen. Although we don’t know that we are using Voice I almost all the time, we are familiar with it and don’t need to learn it. Voice II is a different matter. Voice II is new and takes time to recognize it as the voice we only produce when we are at peace. 

When this writer introduces people to Voice II, they usually just echo it back to him. In this process, he often uses a gong. By softly striking the small gong, the listener hears a sound which he or she can echo. By being tuned in to the sound of the gong, they find that they can sound like the gong while they speak. Voice I is demonstrated by putting three pins on the gong. With the pins on the gong, its sound is muffled. That is Voice I. 

Since the sound is so strikingly different when pins are on the gong or off the gong, a technical, impersonal, description soon follows the production of these two sounds. The sound of our voice during spoken communication fluctuates like when pins are on the gong or off the gong. Voice I stands for pins on the gong and Voice II stands for no pins on the gong.  We then acknowledge that in one kind of talking we speak with Voice I, but in another different kind of talking, we speak with Voice II. At that moment an individual begins to explore Voice II as a self-echoic and as a tact. 

“This type of selection response may be considered a descriptive autoclitic”, because by listening to his or her own sound, Voice II “enters into joint control with the topography currently under self-echoic rehearsal” (Lowenkron, 2006, p. 125). “A joint control account, as a form of mediated stimulus selection, has an advantage over unmediated accounts in that it is independent of the particular stimuli used” (Palmer, 2006). The difference between Lowenkron’s joint control and nonverbal conditional discrimination is that in the former, the speaker has “already well-established echoic and tact repertoires” and “becomes a speaker first by engaging in echoic and then in self-echoic behavior (evoked by the speaker’s request)”, while in the latter, reinforcement is conditional on the joint control of a speaker’s question (where is the book?) and the listener’s response (pointing). The former is a more complicated, verbal form of joint control.  

In SVB, the listener’s verbal behavior, as a speaker, is under joint control of “already well-established” positively sounding “echoic and tact repertoires” and the listener is becoming a “speaker first by engaging in” positive “echoic and then in” positive “self-echoic behavior.” In NVB, by contrast, the reinforcement of the listener as speaker is conditional on “already well-established” negative “echoic and tact repertoires.” In NVB, listeners are reinforced as speakers for nonverbal behavior (do as you are told!). Moreover, in NVB, if the listener can become a speaker, he or she first engages in negative echoic and then in negative self-echoic behavior. 

Thus, in NVB listeners listen and sound very different than in SVB. NVB listeners can’t and don’t hear the sound of speakers with SVB and SVB listeners have trouble listening to the sound of NVB speakers. In SVB listening is not a problem and therefore it is not an issue at all, but in NVB listening is always problem and an issue which is raised, but never solved.

In the section “Why do we echo?” Schlinger acknowledges that “before exposure to socially mediated reinforcement for echoing or repeating what others say, we have a history of automatic reinforcement for producing sounds that match those we’ve heard from our phonological  environment.” He then quotes Bates, O’Connell and Shore (1987), who suggest that “the role of automatic reinforcement can be inferred from the fact that the intonation and segmenting of hearing but not nonhearing infants begin to match the language of phonological environment.” No mention is made, however, of the listener’s comfort or discomfort with  such a phonological environment. Palmer (1996) refers to “this match between one’s vocal response and the phonological stimuli of the verbal community as achieving parity”, but he also doesn’t make any distinction between the phonological environments that elicit negative or positive emotions.  It is unbelievable that behaviorists like Schlinger and so many others can discuss why listeners echo without even mentioning the effect of human emotion. Naturally, before we can speak, we can only echo the emotional sounds which we hear in our phonological environment. 

The phonological environment in which children hear and echo voices of safety, comfort, reassurance, calmness, care and stability, sets the stage for SVB, but the environment in which children hear and thus mainly echo  voices of anxiety, fear, stress, frustration, anger, hopelessness, coercion, sadness and discomfort, sets the stage for NVB. Given that, by the estimation of those who have experimented with the SVB/NVB distinction approximately 95% of our conversations are NVB, it is clear that the phonological environments in which most people grow up are ones in which negative emotions are more often communicated than positive ones. As a consequence, most of us find Voice I automatically reinforcing, because we were reinforced for it. Because SVB is hardly reinforced at all, we usually don’t experience Voice II as automatically reinforcing.

February 5, 2015

February 5, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is a third writing in which this writer comments on the paper “Listening is Behaving Verbally” (2008) by H.D. Schlinger. Skinner defined verbal behavior as behavior that is “reinforced through the mediation of other persons” (1957, p.2). However, many years later, he wrote “except when the listener was also to some extent speaking, listening was not verbal in the sense of “effective only through the mediation of other persons”” (1989, p. 86). Mediation, then, according to Skinner, involves more than only listening. These “other persons” or listeners are not responsible for the behavior of the speaker, if they don’t become verbal, that is, if they don’t themselves become speakers. 

Stated differently, Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior doesn’t apply to uni-directional, coercive, hierarchical, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the listeners are punished for becoming speakers. Skinner's definition of verbal behavior only applies to bi-directional, sensitive, equal, Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), in which listeners are reinforced for becoming speakers and speakers are reinforced for becoming listeners.


The SVB/NVB distinction is necessary for recognizing how we can all be part of the conversation. Those who mostly talk need to become more often a listener and those who mostly listen, need to talk more often. Only in SVB can turn-taking be restored or adjusted. If no adjustments can be made, even if this is talked about and agreed upon by those who would like to make these adjustments, we still engage in NVB. We know how often we have NVB as in most of our spoken communication such adjustments cannot be made. Without the SVB/NVB distinction, the functional analysis of verbal behavior is unlikely to change the way in which we speak. 

Unless we engage in this new way of communicating called SVB, in which a decrease of speaking behavior makes an increase of listening behavior possible and in which a decrease in listening behavior makes an increase of speaking behavior possible, we are going to continue to have more and more NVB.  Schlinger writes “It seems highly unlikely that in competent listeners, warnings, advice, directions, instructions and rules would evoke only simple discriminated or motivated behavior. More likely is that such verbal events evoke compliance with warning, advice, direction, instruction, or rules (and any other nonverbal and operant behaviors), only if they evoke a cascade of verbal behaviors that I am describing as listening or understanding.” Thus, Schlinger distinguishes “unremarkable discriminated and motivated behavior in the listener” from behaviors we call “listening” and urges caution “about using the term listening for all behaviors of the listener.” It is no coincidence that Schlinger, who doesn’t distinguish between the SVB or NVB “cascade of verbal behavior” uses “compliance with warning, advice, direction, instruction, or rules” as his example to illustrate the importance of the difference between “unremarkable discriminated and motivated behavior in the listener” and “listening” or “understanding.” As he doesn’t consider the great difference between the evocative effects of SVB and NVB, Schlinger equates “compliance” with “listening” and “understanding.” This writer, however, believes that “in competent listeners, warnings, advice, directions, instructions and rules would evoke only simple discriminated or motivated behavior”, because the competence of a listener is not determined by words, but by sounds. 


What Schlinger and many others forget is that listeners “are specially trained by the verbal community to reinforce the behavior of the speaker” only if they produce the vocalizations, which the listener can “understand.”

Skinner’s “refined definition” which explains the listener reinforces the speaker “primarily because it establishes and maintains a particular form of behavior in the speaker” (1957, p. 84) applies to SVB and NVB, the two forms of behavior of the speaker. Schlinger seems to distance himself from these “consequent-mediating behaviors” as he is interested only in “structural regularities of a grammar or a language.” 


In 1977, Skinner stated “very little of the behavior of the listener is worth distinguishing as verbal. “ (p.379). This writer finds it hard to believe that Skinner would say this only “as part of a reaction against linguists” and is more inclined to attribute this statement to Skinner’s way of responding as a listener to himself as a speaker. This writer explains much of what Skinner has said and written as SVB. When he spoke with others, he was simultaneously a listener of others and of himself. 

The “boring lecture” example is the exact opposite of the aforementioned. It is an instance of not listening in which the listener is less likely to remember what the teacher has said. This writer considers that a typical instance of hierarchical NVB, in which the speaker (the teacher) is not listening to himself, expects others (the students) to listen to him, in which listeners are bound to feel obliged and coerced to listen to the authority. The evoked covert private speech of the listeners, which distracts from what the speaker says, is a function of the listener’s “unremarkable” ability to discriminate the NVB of the speaker. Since echoing someone’s name transforms a verbal stimulus in a verbal response (Palmer, 2007), echoing “is one form of verbal behavior that is probably important in listening.” However, as in the  boring lecture, the listeners don’t like to echo the sounds which they perceive as aversive. The sound of the speaker's voice in NVB is experienced as punitive and thus prevents learning. Moreover, NVB makes and keeps us unconscious.

February 4, 2015

February 4, 2015 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writing is the second part of this writer's comments on the paper “Listening is behaving verbally” (2008), by H.D. Schlinger, who, like many others, seems to believe that Skinner in Verbal Behavior (1957) “omitted” the behavior of the listener. This writer disagrees with that assumption and believes many don’t realize or pay attention to the fact that because we talk a certain way, we listen a certain way. Moreover, because we talk a certain way, we write a certain way, and, because we write a certain way, we read a certain way. What Schlinger and many others wrongly read into Skinner’s words is caused by their different way of talking. Skinner had a unique way of talking, which hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. What Skinner has written was based on his speaking. 

There was no need for Skinner to “justify” what others considered to be a “omission”, but his instructions and explanations were needed to make people pay attention to “the special responses to the patterns of energy created by the speaker” (1957) (italics added). In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the patterns of energy created by the speaker, are responded to, by the speaker, as his own listener as well as by the listener as someone else. Being listened to simultaneously by oneself and by others, is why Skinner speaks of “special responses.” Such listening responses are “special” because they are not as common as we would like to believe. To the contrary, in most conversation people want others to listen to them or  make an effort to listen to others, but  are not listening to themselves. Such an effort is always involved in listening to speakers who are not listening to themselves. Skinner was easy to listen to. He knew that most people are not listening to themselves while they speak. 

This writer, wants his readers to know that when he is speaking and when listeners are effortlessly listening to him, he is also simultaneously effortlessly listening to himself. In other words, effortless self-listening makes effortless other-listening possible. Without effortless self-listening, other-listening becomes an effort. This describes Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).  

With the extension of SVB and NVB, the statement that “the behavior of the listener in mediating the consequences of the speaker’s behavior is not verbal in any special sense” (1957, p.2) makes perfectly sense, especially since Skinner started out by describing “an adequate account of verbal behavior need cover only as much of the behavior of the listener as is needed to explain the behavior of the speaker” (1957, p. 2). Skinner wrote it like that because he was talking very often in a SVB manner.

  

The following is not, as Schlinger believes, an admission of having forgotten the listener, it is Schlinger, who imagines that “the behavior of the listener was more complex and needed to be considered more fully.” Once we have learned how to speak and listen, the trouble really begins. Schlinger doesn't quote Skinner's words “But, this is only the beginning” (1957, p.10), the beginning of the paragraph in which the reader is informed about what is to come: “Once a repertoire of verbal behavior has been set up, a host of new problems arise from the interaction of its parts” (1957, p. 10). Skinner refers to our communication problems. He comes up with “A New Formulation”, but he anticipates problems which are going to occur while communicating this with others. 

“Verbal behavior is usually the effect of multiple causes. Separate variables combine to extend their functional control, and new forms of behavior emerge from the recombination of old fragments. All of this has appropriate effect upon the listener, whose behavior then calls for analysis” (1957, p.10). Schlinger’s deductive analysis of Verbal Behavior (1957) at best repeats what Skinner had already said, but arrived at inductively.  “The host of problems” that “arise from the interaction of” the “parts” of “the verbal repertoire that has been set up” refers to NVB.

None of these "problems" occur in SVB. It is only  during NVB that “still another set of problems arises from the fact, often pointed out, that a speaker is normally also a listener” (1957, p.10). During SVB the speaker perceives him or herself as the listener and audience members listen to a speaker who listens to him or herself. Consequently, in SVB, the different parts of the verbal repertoire can interact very smoothly. It should be noted that Skinner mentions “the fact, often pointed out, that a speaker is normally also a listener.” He seems to have written this to counteract the abnormal circumstances of NVB in which “a speaker" is not "also a listener.” 

During SVB, self-listening and its importance for other-listening, is obvious to both the speaker as well as the listener. Indeed, during SVB, the speaker can understand why he “reacts to his own behavior in several important ways” (1957, p.10). During NVB, however, the speaker is totally unaware about which “Part of what he says is under control of other parts of his behavior”(1957, p.10). 

 

Skinner's statement that “we refer to this interaction when we say that the speaker qualifies, orders, or elaborates his behavior at the moment it is produced” (1957, p.10) evokes some surprising conclusions. When we, the listeners, say that the speaker “qualifies” or “elaborates”, the listener finds that he or she is spoken with, that is, the listener is having SVB with the speaker. However, when listeners say a speaker “orders”, they find that we are being spoken at, they are being coerced. Although listeners,  due to previous behavioral history, may be used to this, it doesn’t make any difference as to what is actually happening. The “host of problems”  involves NVB, in which the speaker speaks at, not with the listener. 

If we consider the previous statement (“we refer to this interaction when we say that the speaker qualifies, orders, or elaborates his behavior at the moment it is produced”) in the light of SVB, we begin to understand why the speaker’s NVB-private speech, in which he “orders” “his behavior at the moment that it is produced”, prevents or hinders his public speech, in which he “qualifies” or “elaborates.” Coercive “qualification” or “elaboration” doesn’t make good teaching. When Skinner writes “The mere emission of responses is an incomplete characterization when behavior is composed “ (1957, p.10), he is saying that ‘talking at people doesn’t work, but talking with them does.’ During NVB our behavior is not “composed”, because the speaker is not listening to him or herself. In NVB, no “new forms of behavior emerge from the recombination of old fragments” (1957, p.10) in the speaker, only more coercive “ordering” of the listener. 

When the listener presumably “understands” the NVB-speaker, this means that he or she is merely following orders and is not required to think. In SVB, on the other hand, the “speaker and the listener within the same skin engage in activities which are traditionally described as “thinking” (1957, p.10). Skinner mentions that the extent to which we manipulate our own behavior, review it, reject it or emit it in modified form (1957, p.10), is determined in part by the extent to which the speaker serves as his or her own listener (1957, p.10). However, our ability as a speaker to be our own listener, is limited to the amount of time we spend having SVB. 

When Skinner says “in part”, he means that we can only “think” to the extent that we have been conditioned by a communication which includes activities that involve the “speaker and the listener within the same skin” (1957, p.10). His SVB scientific repertoire made him “a skillful speaker”, who learned to “tease our weak behavior and to manipulate variables that generate and strengthen new responses in his repertoire” (1957, p.10).

Although it is great that “such behavior is commonly observed in the verbal practices of literature as well as of science and logic” (1957, p.11), it is “only a beginning” (p.10), because what is urgently needed is that such behavior is observed during our spoken communication, because then and only then, will “An analysis of these activities, together with their effects upon the listener” lead us to the solution of “the role of verbal behavior in the problem of knowledge” (1957, p.11). 

The “problem of knowledge” is maintained by our NVB and will only be dissolved by SVB, our calm, sensitive, conscious way of speaking. The reader is reminded that when speaking and listening are not perceived as functionally the same, misunderstandings are inevitable.  As there can be “understanding”, understanding is never an issue during SVB. Schlinger beats a dead horse when he repeats Skinner who states “the listener listens, pays attention to, or understands the speaker.” He says nothing new when he concludes “any analysis of speaking also applies to listening.” 

Skinner never as Schlinger suggests “moved away from listening as verbal behavior.” Besides, Skinner “could justify that because, except when the listener was also to some extent speaking, listening was not verbal in the sense of “being effective only through the mediation of other persons.” Skinner refers to turn-taking. When, in NVB, there is no turn-taking, when the listener doesn’t speak or is not  allowed to speak, listening is not verbal, because it is not “being effective.. through the mediation of other persons” (1989, p. 86).  Only when there is turn-taking, only during SVB, is listening considered to be verbal behavior.  Interestingly, Skinner states “…But if listeners are responsible for the behavior of speakers, we need to look more closely at what they do” (1989, p. 86).

February 3, 2015

February 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

In the abstract of the paper “Listening is Behaving Verbally” (2008) H.D. Schlinger concludes “there may be no functional distinction between speaking and listening.” The implications of this assertion for how we communicate, is of great interest to this writer. Specifically, he would like to know what kind of communication results from this  important notion. He suggests that Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is spoken communication in which verbalizers and mediators, regardless of whether they are inside or outside of the skin, because they change roles, are so attuned with one another that speaking is permanently perceived as simultaneously listening and listening is always perceived as simultaneously speaking.

  

What happens when speaking and listening are perceived as functionally distinct? And, in what kind of an environment is one or the other the case? These have to be different environments. Environments in which speaking and listening are considered to be functionally distinct far outnumber those in which they are not considered to be distinct. This raises the question: why is this so? Is it because we don’t know that speaking and listening are not, as most of us believe, functionally distinct, that we keep creating environments in which speaking and listening are believed to be distinct. We would benefit if we adhered to the fact that speaking and listening are not functionally distinct, but this would require us to admit our ignorance. Scientific behavior is made possible by a contingency which stimulates us to admit what we don’t know, but such an environment can only be maintained by SVB. Environments in which we are afraid to admit that we don’t know are maintained by Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

The scientific environment pertaining to writing is very strict. This led to Schlinger’s finding, but, when it comes to how scientists speak and listen, nobody bothers whether they are functionally indistinguishable. Spoken en communication is under different discriminative control than written communication. The latter is supposedly more precise and the former is assumed to have been replaced by the latter. Not much effort has gone into making our spoken communication scientific. Schlinger’ s paper is just another version of scientific beating around the busch. 

The paper mention words such as “speaking” and “listening”, but all the reader reads are words which have no bearing on how anyone speaks or listens. There is little progress in honing in on the functional account of Verbal Behavior (1957). Although Skinner regarded this as his most important work, it took a long time for behaviorists to pay attention to it. 

“The perception that Verbal Behavior was all about the speaker” has prevented many behaviorists from paying attention to listening. Like  Schlinger, they spend more hours writing than talking. Indeed, “The listener plays a crucial role in the development and maintenance of the speaker’s behavior, as evidenced by Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior as “behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons” (1957).

Schlinger read Skinner, who wrote  that “the listener engages in a repertoire  of behavior that is itself verbal”, but probably neither Skinner nor Schlinger spend much time engaging in conversation  in which we talk about and listen to the conversation in which we analyze the role of speaking and listening. This writer is not saying that nothing like this ever happened, but he insists that it happened only very rarely. By talking about talking, we can be more specific than by writing about talking. 

 

Schlinger suggests “that what we most often speak of as listening involves subvocal verbal behavior.” His suggestion creates the illusion that he is talking with us, when in fact, we are only reading something which he has written. This diffusion of the distinction between spoken communication and written communication is very common and often goes unnoticed. We are so often exposed to it that we no longer differentiate between what is written and what is spoken. What good is the suggestion that there is no functional distinction between speaking and listening, if it is only written?  If this point became clear, as it should, during our conversation, we would instantly experience SVB and recognize that NVB is based on the false and nonsensical belief that speaking and listening can be distinct. 

In Verbal Behavior (1957, p. 11) Skinner writes “some of the behavior of the listener resembles the behavior of speaking, particularly when the listener “understands” what is said.” [italic added]. What he refers to is that when someone understands what is being said, there cannot be a functional distinction between speaking and listening, because they have to match. Misunderstanding necessarily involves the mismatch between speaking and listening, when the listener is listening to something other than the speaker. Under such circumstances speaking and listening seem to be functionally distinct. Whether we understand each other will depend on “forms of operant behaviors under various kinds of stimulus and motivational control.” For instance, the understanding of and the answer to a question, a mand, is controlled by motivational operations. However, to answer a question, one must know what one is talking about. When asked to pass the butter, one must be able to tact the yellow stuff, which we smear on our sandwiches. Many other forms of verbal behavior come into play.

The point of this writing is that we don’t have enough SVB to verify that there is no functional distinction between speaking and listening. When there seems to be such a distinction this signifies NVB, verbal behavior that is involved in all our problematic relationships. The “provision that the ‘listener’ must be responding in ways which have been conditioned precisely in order to reinforce the behavior of the speaker” (1957, p.225), which was a refinement of “behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons” (1957, p.2) indicates that the verbal behavior of the listener is always already included in the verbal behavior of the speaker. 

Schlinger got it wrong that “Skinner seemed to minimize the actions of the listener.” Skinner’s statement “an adequate account of verbal behavior need cover only as much of the behavior of the listener as is needed to explain the behavior of the speaker” (1957, p. 2) isn’t as Schlinger believes a minimization of the actions of the listener, it is another indication that Skinner often experienced “the speaker and the listener within the same skin” and was intrigued by the fact that he himself “was able to engage in activities which are traditionally described as “thinking”. Moreover, as a “skillful speaker” Skinner would “manipulate his own behavior”, “review it” and “reject or emit it in modified form.” What he did was “determined” not “in part” but mainly by the extent to which he “served as his own listener.” This is a direct reference to SVB, in which the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. If this is not the case, the speaker produces NVB, because “the speaker and the listener within the same skin” are not engaged in real “thinking” and the speaker doesn’t serve as his own listener. The unskilled NVB speaker doesn’t and can't learn “to tease out weak behavior” and consequently dominates and coerces the conversation non-verbally as well as verbally. In other words, the speaker in NVB always demands the attention of the listener, but during SVB, the speaker effortlessly maintains the listener's attention.