July 6, 2015

July 6, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my third response to “Sound on the rebound: bringing form and function back to the forefront in understanding nonhuman primate vocal signaling” by Owren and Rendall (2001). Constructs such as “meaning, reference and semanticity” have not improved the way in which human beings speak. These inferences have distracted us from how we sound while we speak. This is why, to this very day, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is more common than Sound Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

If we were to pay attention to how we sound while we speak, we would find out that we are often aversively influencing each other. Our crowded environments demand that we get better at communication so that we can tolerate each other’s proximity. 

Young primates don’t respond to alarm calls with predator-specific escape behavior, but attacks and alarm calls become paired due to classical conditioning and thus they learn. Study of primate vocalizations is useful as it stimulates us to figure out how we influence each other with our vocal verbal behavior. 

It is practical to focus on how speaker vocalizations directly or indirectly influence the behavior of the listener.  What can be learned from primates is that “information encoding and transmission cannot be taken literally as explanation" and, therefore, "the critical issue becomes whether or not that notion has value as a conceptual tool.” 

Separate investigation of sender and receiver, which is inspired by the notion that animals “may or may not have coincident fitness interest in any given situation” should not distract from the common, but easily overlooked fact that when there is “coincident fitness interest,” we are dealing with nonverbal instances of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), but when there is no "coincident fitness interest", we are dealing with instances of nonverbal versions of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

Once the distinction between SVB and NVB is known, it becomes  clear that the “conflation” of “senders and receivers” is not a consequence of “metaphorical constructs”, but of the author's wish to identify “cooperative behavior.” When we view their use of “metaphorical constructs” in terms of SVB and NVB, we readily discover that their bias was a function SVB.

July 5, 2015

July 5, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my second response to “Sound on the rebound: bringing form and function back to the forefront in understanding nonhuman primate vocal signaling” by Owren and Rendall (2001). As we will have an evolutionary, thorough-going, environmental account of how primates communicate, we may pay attention to why we talk the way we do. We can learn from studies on primates that as speakers we influence listeners in a positive way or we dominate them in negative manner. 


In other words, we either engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) or Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The former evokes approach behavior in the receiver or listener, such as grooming, but the latter, as the receiver is threatened by the dominant conspecific, elicits avoidance and escape behavior. 


Neither SVB nor NVB is what only the speaker or the listener does; it is what they do together. Thus, the dominant speaker, who coerces the subordinate listener, engages in NVB together with this subordinate listener and both engage in NVB. In hierarchical communication among humans dominant as well as subordinate communicators engage in NVB. Although there may be moments of SVB, the hierarchy is maintained by NVB.

 

By contrast, in SVB, the non-aversive speaker is no longer dominant, and, because of that, the subordinate listener is no longer subordinate. Stated differently, the hierarchy is no longer created and maintained by the way in which we talk. During SVB the speaker and the listener transcend biology, which, in spite of the arrival of language, continued to determine that we either dominate each other or are dominated by each other while we talk.  SVB and NVB are phylogenetic human behaviors which can be observed in non-human primates.   

The paper I currently respond to is titled “Sound on the rebound: bringing form and function back to the forefront in understanding nonhuman primate vocal signaling.” The authors are trying to do the same as what I am trying to do with human vocal signaling: by bringing back the attention to the sound of our voice while we speak, we are going to find out that form and function are inseparable.  If our sound is to establish equality, harmony and safety, it must have the properties that will make this possible. 


“Dense forest habitants should generally favor stereotyped calls with simple messages resistant to transmission degradation, while open habitats would promote more complex, graded acoustics and messages taking advantage of additional contextual and visual information available to receivers.” 


It is no surprise “the strongest demonstrations have involved predator-specific alarm calls” as “acoustically distinct vocalizations” are apparent in primates and other species. However, when we consider “many sounds associated with activities like group movement, foraging, and social interaction” which “do not have consistent antecedents or outcomes”, it is difficult to infer from such coarse-grained vocalizations as such “results tend to reveal fundamental differences rather than similarities between primate calls and human speech.”  


 The authors object to the troubling fact that the study of primate vocalizations has become based on concepts “borrowed from linguistics.” I totally agree with their concern and wish to extend their objection even further. Their concern is “that this stance makes normative biological constructs secondary to linguistic ones, particularly when calls are characterized as coded, referential information.” The same mistake is made in human vocalization. We urgently need a natural, biological, behaviorist account of the sounds we make while we speak.  Inferred, metaphoric, constructs, such as “coded, referential information”, don’t “readily translate in either mechanism or function, two pillars of evolutionary analysis.” Certain environments, certain people make us sound a certain way.  

July 4, 2015

July 4, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my response to “Sound on the rebound: bringing form and function back to the forefront in understanding nonhuman primate vocal signaling” by Owren and Rendall (2001). I first respond to the abstract, which tells me that this paper is about the complications involved in “comparing human language with primate nonhuman primate vocal behavior.” Especially, there are “conceptual worries, particularly in the teleology inherent in using complex linguistic phenomena from humans as models for simpler vocal processes in nonhumans.”

Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is the kind of talking in which the speaker is aware of how he or she sounds, that is, how he or she is perceived by the listener. If the listener experiences the vocal behavior of the speaker as an appetitive stimulus which sounds good then the speaker and the listener are engaging in SVB. If, on the other hand, the listener experiences the sound of the speaker as an aversive stimulus, the speaker and the listener engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). As the discoverer and explorer of these two universal subsets of vocal behavior in humans, I know better than anyone else about the implications and complications involved in the SVB/NVB distinction. 

Whenever people in SVB listen to the sound of their own voice while they speak, they realize that they are not fixated on what they are saying and concerned with how they are saying it. This shift of focus is profound. Surprisingly, what people are saying is gaining more importance due to how they are saying it. Also, the speaker-as-own-listener is not trying to say anything in any particular kind of way, but is simply, calmly, authentically and consciously expressing him or herself. In other words, there is no struggle in the speaker to find the right words, to get the attention or to convince others. When the environment, consisting of other people, is receptive to the speaker-as-own-listener, to the person who listens to him or herself while he or she speaks, the speaker is able to remain effortlessly focused on what he or she wants to say. Stated differently, when a speaker is not trying to impress others, but is able to say whatever he or she is thinking and feeling, the listener can effortlessly listen and comprehend what the speaker is saying. Furthermore, when a listener wants to be a speaker, he or she can do that and a former speaker then becomes a listener to this speaker. Like the first speaker, the second speaker is also listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. As a result of turn-taking speakers and listeners  reciprocally reinforce each other during SVB. However, NVB occurs again when speakers no longer listen to themselves.  

I will now describe how this paper explains things about the SVB/NVB distinction. We have to carefully pick apart the sentence that “it also creates conceptual worries, particularly in the teleology inherent in using complex linguistic phenomena from human models for simple vocal processes in nonhumans". 

We have to be mindful that we are only reading and writing about these matters. Speaking about linguistic phenomena or listening to a speaker who talks about these matters is an entirely different behavior than reading or writing about it. 

Speaking about "linguistic phenomena" in a SVB or in a NVB fashion will be experienced differently by the listener. I think that most of these conceptual worries occur as we don’t speak about it (but mainly write and read about it) and those very few moments that we do talk about it we engage in NVB. All our conceptual worries can be dissolved in SVB. 

The “difficulties engendered by a linguistically inspired, meaning-based view of primate calls, specifically that vocalizations are arbitrarily structured vehicles for transmitting encoded referential information” are in my opinion reifications caused by too much writing and reading and a lack of talking. We treat abstractions put together by our verbal behavior as real things. Moreover, we make processes into things as we change verbs into nouns. Presumably human beings possess thoughts and feelings do things with these thoughts and feelings as if they were tools in a toolbox. Although, like everybody else, these researchers don’t know anything about how to stimulate and maintain SVB, since they are scientists, they are more inclined to be objective when conversations get stranded in NVB. Owren and Rendall fully acknowledge that "linguistically inspired" researchers have elevated written definitions above reality itself. This is why, according to them, we are stuck with the “metaphor-as-explanation approach.”

July 3, 2015

July 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my fourth response to “What do animal signals mean?” by Rendall, Owren & Ryan (2009). In yesterday’s writing I commented on the mentalist view that courtship signals “must be honest to be be functional.” Since humans, in the process of learning how to read and write join their speaking and listening behaviors, literacy involves the development of the speaker-as-own-listener, that is, of consciousness. “Honesty” is a word  only used in certain environments. Although under certain circumstance we make the sound which is functional, we don’t decide to be functional or to make that particular sound. 

Skinner once said “men think they shape the world, but they are shaped by it.” However, when SVB can happen it will happen and this not a matter of honesty. 

“How the courtship signaling dynamic plays out and where it is at any point in evolutionary time will depend on inevitable asymmetries in the reproductive interests of males and females coupled to constraints placed on signal production and perception by morphological and neurological limitations.” 

In conclusion to responding to this paper, I want to change the author’s question “What do animals mean?” into “What do humans mean?” Ultimately, if we learn anything from animals, it will be that we, like them, have evolved to influence each other rather than to send, decode, store and retrieve information. 

Language is a recent event in evolutionary history. This animal research provides the contrast we need to loosen up about our verbal fixation, which obfuscates the fact that we are either influencing each other in ways which are positive or negative. In NVB we are negatively influencing each other, but in SVB we are positively influencing each other. What we say can only play a significant role in SVB, but in NVB it is mainly about how we say it. Anyone familiar with the SVB/NVB distinction agrees that in NVB, the speaker always threatens, forces, provokes, overwhelms, intimidates, agitates, denies, rejects, frustrates, ignores, disrespects, abuses and violates the listener.  

The question “What do animals mean?” is better than “What information do animals convey?” as it leads humans to the  acknowledgement that they are influencing each other with  NVB or with SVB. This sets in motion a development in which we will be able to decrease our NVB and increase our SVB.  

The sound of the speaker induces an appetitive or an aversive experience in the listener. While we speak, we always influence the listener (the listener within our own skin included) with an appetitive or an aversive contingency. I agree with the author’s “emphasis on influence that stays closer to the basic evolutionary principles in ascribing signalers and perceivers distinct roles and potentially divergent interests in communication processes.” NVB is ubiquitous because we have not yet looked at our way of talking from an evolutionary perspective.  We assumed all sorts of things about our human interaction that distracted from what we do biologically: we are emotionally and intellectually influenced by each other.   

“The corollary is that we must also accept that signaling phenomena will often entail asymmetries not generally observed or modeled in formal systems like language.” With our sound we signal whether we as speakers are feeling safe, supported or threatened. The speaker's anxiety, anger, fear, stress or confusion is audible in his or her voice and this immediately affects the listeners. Whether we know it or not, our voice sets the tone for our conversations.  I agree that “understanding animal signaling is likely to be the key to working out the evolution of human communication behavior as well.” 

The authors conclude with “It is also both teleological and circular in using constructs developed for one recently evolved and possibly highly derived system of communication (language) to model processes involved in scores of other simpler and phylogenetically older systems in other species.”  NVB is based on phylogenetically older systems such as fight and flight, but SVB is based on the more recently developed "highly derived system of language." In other words, NVB is not and cannot be scientific and only SVB can be scientific. 

In NVB we are again and again putting the horse behind the wagon. “That [informational] approach always gets the evolutionary and the epistemological logic completely backwards.” Without knowing it the authors have also provided evidence for SVB and NVB in nonverbal organisms. “Instead, and as in other areas of ethology and biological inquiry, it is by comparing phenomena across a wide range of animal taxa that we discover the general principles with which to understand the characteristics of any single one.” 

It is 5:00am and the birds are singing. I appreciate these ethologists for reinforcing our understanding of human language. Interestingly, those who object to a behavioral account also object to an evolutionary account. Their NVB prevents SVB, in which we have “more agreeable and biologically realistic accounts of animal behavior.”