March 3, 2015
Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer
Dear Reader,
During Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) the phylogenetically
determined neural musculature of a speaker makes production of sound possible,
which we shall call Voice I, which is reinforced by listeners, whose bodies
have been conditioned so that they mainly reinforce and maintain NVB. In NVB,
the listener’s neural behavior, activates
private speech or thinking, which, to the extent that the listener was conditioned by Sound
Verbal Behavior (SVB), distracts from the speaker’s public speech. In NVB, the listener will only
be permitted to speak, to the extent that he or she reinforces the speaker, that
is, when he or she produces SVB. However, this SVB of the listener, who becomes
a speaker, is not and cannot be reinforced by the speaker, who
was mainly conditioned by NVB. To the contrary, SVB of the listener, who
is only occasionally is allowed to become a speaker, is only tolerated because it is
reinforcing or ‘enabling’ the NVB
speaker.
SVB is only possible for us to the extent
that our bodies were changed by it. Since we produce mostly NVB, it is evident
that we have been mainly exposed to and conditioned by NVB. The different
neural behavior of SVB speakers is audible in the sound of their voice. In SVB
speakers speak with a voice which we shall call Voice II. This sound can only be
reinforced by listeners whose bodies have been conditioned to do so. Thus,
SVB fits with the refinement of the definition of Verbal Behavior as “Behavior
that is reinforced through the mediation of other people, but only when the
other people are behaving in ways that have been shaped by a verbal environment
or language.” (Skinner, 1986, p. 121). It refers to the listener who speaks!
Speakers and listeners only
interact to the extent they can take
turns. In NVB turn-taking happens at a minimum, whereas in SVB turn-taking happens at a maximum. Any conversation consists of a proportion of positive and
negative exchanges. Any verbal episode can be considered as more or less
noxious or as more or less sound. The conversation in which speakers and
listeners voluntarily take turns, is
one in which speakers will speak with Voice II. Such an episode consists mainly of SVB instances.
Speaker’s and listener’s repertoires are learned at different times and under
different circumstances, in other words, they are functionally different and
analytically separate repertoires (Ledoux, 2014, p. 446). In SVB speaking and
listening happen at more or less a similar rate, but in NVB speaking and
listening happen at very different rates. Speaking and listening are only “virtually inseparable” during SVB.
The “neural behavior of verbal thinking” or the “simultaneous speaking-listening”
(Ledoux, 2014, p.446), only occurs
due to SVB. In NVB, by contrast, the listener’s covert speech contradicts the speaker’s overt speech and to the extent that the listener can become a
speaker (after first being affected by the speaker’s antecedent stimulus, Voice
I), to the extent that the listener's covert speech becomes overt, that listener who became a speaker will also
distract the NVB speaker. This will even be more the case if the listener who became the speaker experienced more SVB than the NVB
speaker.
By calling the speaker the “verbalizer” and the listener the
“mediator” Julie and Ernest Vargas (1990) intended to “better address the nonvocal
forms of verbal behavior.” Nevertheless,
this change of name has only strengthened the already existing focus on what is
now called the verbalizer. It couldn’t
and didn’t bring any attention to the
sounds of SVB and NVB, two universally occurring subsets of vocal verbal
behavior. This writing is addressing the important issue of how mediators are stimulated to become verbalizers, which will enhance SVB and replace NVB.