August 13, 2015

August 13, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This writing is my thirteenth response to the paper “Talker-specific learning in speech perception” by Nygaard and Pisoni (1998).  The researchers are unknowingly honing in on what I call Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), when they state “The crucial research question then becomes whether, given experience with the particular aspects of the speech signal relating to talker identity, it follows that listeners also become sensitive to talker-specific linguistic properties.” What is said in SVB is easier understood because of how it is said and how the speaker sounds determines whether what the speaker says makes sense to the listener. However, the opposite is also true for Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which “particular aspects of the speech signal relating to talker identity”, the sound of the speaker’s voice, because of its aversive nature, gets more attention than the “talker-specific linguistic properties.” It requires the listener's effort to relate these “aspects of talker identity” with “talker-specific linguistic properties”, if the speaker expresses NVB, but if the speaker has SVB, no such effort is needed. 

Unaware of the SVB/NVB distinction, the researchers interpret various investigations done by others by stating “Taken together, these practice effects with synthetic and compressed speech suggest that the speech processing system is capable of adjusting to a variety of distortions, both synthetic and natural, that occur in the acoustic signal.” Only in NVB there is, because of the aversive-sounding voice of the speaker, a need for the listener to adjust “to a variety of distortions”, but in SVB there is no need to adjust to the speaker’s “acoustic signal” as there is no aversive stimulation. 

In SVB the speaker’s voice only has an appetitive effect on the listener. Not capturing this affective quality of the speaker’s vocalization, these authors believe that “Each talker’s vocal style shapes the acoustic realization of linguistic constituents in different but systematic and predictable ways.” With knowledge about the SVB/NVB distinction, however, is is clear that  SVB speakers shape in a SVB way and NVB speakers shape in a NVB way. How the speaker sounds influences the negative or positive emotional experiences of the listener and indeed shape “the acoustic realization of linguistic constituents in different but systematic and predictable ways.”

Tossing out the emotional influence of how we talk is characteristic for NVB. In SVB, listeners can recognize this influence, because they can, as speakers, articulate and explore the positive or the negative emotions, which they experience because of how the speaker sounds. In other words, in SVB there is feedback from the listener to the speaker. Rather than the listener making an effort to adjust to the speaker, the SVB speaker effortlessly adjusts to the listener. Effortless adjustment of the speaker to the listener occurs because the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. 

As the speaker listens to him or herself and experiences him or herself, he or she estimates how listeners other than the speaker are experiencing him or her. As the speaker listens to him or herself more often, his or her ability to accurately assess whether his voice is having a positive or a negative effect on the experience of other listeners reaches increasingly higher levels of accuracy. As a consequence, SVB is continued, even under the worst circumstances. This writer has reached this point and believes that others can reach it too.  What used to be a big problem turned around and made his life enjoyable. He used to feel very troubled and upset by how others were sounding, but as he now recognizes NVB as NVB and SVB as SVB, he is able to withdraw from NVB and approach and attract SVB. The problems of NVB can be avoided only if we recognize NVB as NVB. For most of us  this is not the case since we also don’t recognize SVB as SVB. Once we discriminate this distinction, NVB will decrease and SVB will increase. Our ignorance about this distinction prevents SVB and perpetuates NVB.  

  

These researchers don’t know the SVB/NVB distinction and their reasoning is by default based on NVB. Since they are scientists, they find some pieces of the puzzle. “Nevertheless, perceptual adaptation to individual talkers’ voices, as mentioned previously, has traditionally been cast as a problem of eliminating variation due to individual differences in speakers’ voices from underlying linguistic constants, rather than as a perceptual learning process in which listeners become attuned to properties of the speech signal which subserve both talker identification and linguistic processing". This “perceptual learning process in which listeners become attuned” describes SVB. Note that the “problem of eliminating variation due to individual differences in speaker’s voices” is not the speaker’s problem, but the listener’s problem. It is, of course, also the speaker’s problem, but it doesn't seem that way as long as he or she can get away with forcing others to listen to him or her and not listening to him or herself. The speaker’s problem becomes the listener’s problem in NVB. When the speaker recognizes his or her own NVB, he or she changes his or her sound and influences the listener who is him or her self and other listeners positively. 

We keep going around in circles as long as we treat speakers and listeners as separate entities. In SVB, in which the speaker listens to himself while he or she speaks, the speaker is the listener. When the listener within the same skin is not listening to the speaker, the speaker produces NVB. It is not the listener outside of the skin of the speaker, who needs to become “attuned to properties of the speech signal which subserve both talker identification and linguistic processing,” but it is the listener within the same skin as the speaker, who needs to become “attuned.”

In the discussion section of the paper, the authors mention that “Individual listener performance across training groups ranged from 28% correct for the poorest learner to 97% correct for the best learner, after 9 days of training. This finding suggests that simple exposure to the set of voices over the 9-day period was not sufficient for perceptual learning of talkers’ voices to occur.” Much more is involved in real life when we the listener adjust to how the speaker sounds. Generally speaking, someone who has experienced more SVB in his or her behavioral history adjusts to someone with NVB less easily than someone with more NVB. However, someone with more NVB in his or her behavioral history will more easily adjust to someone who has more SVB in his or her behavioral history. The authors clearly have no clue about this. “Given that these listeners differed in their ability to learn the voices, it was possible to characterize some of the listeners as “good” voice learners and others as “poor” voice learners.” 

What is a “good” or a “poor” voice learner, depends from whether one reasons from a SVB or a NVB perspective. From a SVB perspective, the “poor” voice learner, although he or she may be impaired by the speaker, recognizes NVB as NVB and is therefore a “good” voice learner. In other words, failure in NVB implies success in SVB. Many things are upside down because of how we talk. Only from a NVB perspective, the person who is distracted by the NVB speaker is called a “poor” voice learner. 

Without the SVB/NVB distinction we are bound to draw many wrong conclusions. ““Good” learners improved to a much greater extent than did “poor” learners. This divergence suggests that through practice in categorizing and explicitly identifying voices, “good” learners become “attuned” to the fine acoustic–phonetic details that distinguish each talker’s voice.” From a SVB perspective, however, the fact that “poor” learners improved to a much lesser extent indicates that they were “attuned” to and upset about, distracted by and therefore negatively affected by the not-so-fine aversive acoustic-phonetic details of the NVB speaker’s voice. Such a distraction would never occur with a SVB speaker. 

Many people are classified as “poor” learners simply because they respond with fear, anxiety and stress to a NVB speaker. ““Poor” learners do not seem to acquire the same kind of perceptual sensitivity using these voice dimensions during this type of laboratory training task.” However, the NVB speaker doesn’t acquire “perceptual sensitivity” to the listener as long as or she can continue to force others listen to him or to her. Thus, the conclusion that““Poor” learners do not seem to acquire the same kind of perceptual sensitivity” is confounded by poor NVB speakers. Yet, there is hope, as the authors found “it appears that both talker-specific and listener-specific variables contribute to the eventual identification of a talker’s voice.”  

Moreover, the finding that “Perceptual learning of a set of novel talkers’ voices caused listeners to be better able to recover the linguistic content of the signal” experimentally demonstrates that “the perceptual mechanisms responsible for analyzing talker identity are not independent from the mechanisms responsible for extracting the lexical content of an utterance from the speech wave form.” Can we finally admit that how the speaker sounds always affects the listener’s ability to understand the speaker?

  

As SVB and NVB are universal subclasses of vocal verbal behavior within each language, the authors inadvertently make indirect references to this distinction. “One explanation of these results is that the “poor” learners did not receive sufficient training to “fine tune” or adjust their attentional mechanisms to the relevant talker-specific information in the signal.” This not receiving "sufficient training to fine tune" of course means they didn't engage often enough in SVB to be able to recognize NVB. Furthermore, the insufficient training also indicates that something is wrong on the speaker’s side and not on the listener’s side. In NVB, however, it is always the listener who is blamed for not understanding the speaker. Interestingly, the authors add “It should be noted that the “poor” learners did not necessarily have difficulty processing speech from a variety of talkers, but rather, when the perceptual system was taxed, as when words were presented in noise, they were unable to utilize their prior knowledge of each talkers’ idiosyncratic style of speech to help recover the phonetic content and lexical information in the signal.” They seem to be saying that in NVB speakers produce some kind of voice-noise, which taxes the listeners’ perceptual system with their “idiosyncratic style of speech.”

August 12, 2015

August 12, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my twelfth response to “Talker-specific learning in speech perception” by Nygaard and Pisoni (1998). These researchers focus on something which has been apparent to me for a long time. It has often bothered me that what seems obvious to me is not accepted, let alone understood, by others. With certain people and under certain circumstances I am able to talk, think, feel and function coherently, but with other people and other circumstances I stumble over my words, I cannot think, I cannot remember and I only seem to make mistakes. 

I recognize myself in what these authors write about. “In our use of language, we are often aware that through exposure to and learning of a novel talker’s voice, for example, we become increasingly able to recover the linguistic aspects of an utterance that seemed difficult to understand only moments earlier.” This positive occurrence is one which I would call Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), in which the speaker’s voice has a positive effect on the listener. The influence of this “novel talker’s voice” is in stark contrast to the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) speaker’s voice, which has a negative effect on the listener. The more “exposure to and learning of” a SVB voice can occur, the more capable and confident we seem to become.

“Perceptual learning involves an increase in the ability to extract information from the environment, as a result of experience and practice with stimulation coming from it. Gibson (1969) has identified two types of perceptual learning.” One type suggests “that perceptual sensitivity can be enhanced by pre-exposure to a set of stimuli.” In this type “Mere experience of the stimulus domain increases perceivers’ sensitivity.” If we consider the sound of the speaker’s voice as “stimulus domain”, we find that exposure to both SVB as well as NVB increases the listener’s “perceptual sensitivity.” However, if the listener is more exposed to NVB than to SVB, a different kind of sensitivity begins to occur in the listener, who will become biased to whatever he or she has been most often exposed to. 

“In the second type, explicit experience in categorizing or identifying stimuli allows perceivers to become attuned to specific diagnostic physical features.” Thus, the listener’s “experience in categorizing or identifying stimuli” as belonging to the SVB or NVB category depends on the ways in which he or she was conditioned.  Authors describe this learning process “which allows the perceivers to become attuned to specific diagnostic physical features.” However, such becoming “attuned” of course only applies to SVB, because NVB is only about coercion and obedience.

“For this type of learning, the organization of stimuli into categories has been shown to have an important influence on subsequent perceptual sensitivity.” The listener’s “perceptual sensitivity” is  shaped by the extent to which he or she is more often exposed to SVB or NVB. I was never able to learn much from speakers who had a lot of NVB and little or no SVB. From an early age I favored SVB speakers, because with them was I able to learn and do something right. With NVB speakers, such as my father, I couldn’t do anything right. 

“In the case of talker learning, categorizing or identifying talker’s voices may lead to increased distinctiveness of the perceptual dimensions of talker identity.” Although I was affected by the rejection of my father, luckily there were plenty of SVB speakers in my family, such as my mother, my grandmothers and my uncle, who supported and encouraged me. However, since they did not have any education, they couldn’t play a significant role in my academic development. Their primarily emotional support allowed me to listen to myself and figure out that I needed SVB to succeed in life. 

“If a benefit of perceptual learning of voice can be demonstrated for linguistic processing as well, it would suggest that the same underlying dimensions subserve both perceptual abilities.” Such a “benefit of perceptual learning” can be demonstrated with SVB. Everything I have achieved is in my opinion due to SVB. In the studies reviewed by these authors “it has been found that a number of factors, such as the a priori distinctiveness of the set of voices to be learned, the number of talkers to be identified or discriminated, and the length or duration of the utterances used during training (i.e., syllables, words, phrases, passages), can mediate learning of voices.” Another way of summarizing these results is to state that in SVB we really listen to each other, because we acknowledge that it takes time to have a conversation. In NVB, on the other hand, we are always in a rush and stressed, as, supposedly, there is not enough time. 

“Not surprisingly, listeners learn to recognize talkers’ voices most readily when utterances of long duration from a few highly distinct talkers are used.” In NVB, the speakers dominate and intimidate the listeners and talkers struggle to get the attention from other talkers, by forcing them to remain listeners. Moreover, in NVB communicators don’t give each other the time to speak and cut each other off whenever they can. “These results suggest that a period of perceptual learning is required for listeners to become sensitive to talker-specific information in the speech signal.” Only SVB has such “a period of perceptual learning” for the listener. In NVB no such learning period is needed as the speaker coerces the listener.

The author’s conclusion that “Listeners do not appear to acquire expertise in talker recognition effortlessly, but rather learn over time to attend explicitly to the unique, acoustically distinct properties of each talker’s voice” is clearly based on the ubiquity of NVB. Talking and listening is perceived as effortful only during NVB, but during SVB these two behaviors occur effortlessly. The fact that learning occurs “over time” does not have to mean that learning involves any effort. However, given the common lack of time which is experienced when we have NVB, the authors equate the lack of time with effort. In SVB we take more time to talk, but it takes no effort. 

August 11, 2015

August 11, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my eleventh response to “Talker-specific learning in speech perception” by Nygaard and Pisoni (1998). Findings suggest “the effects of talker variability on perception and memory are a consequence of the additional processing time and resources that are devoted to encoding talker-specific information when the talker’s voice changes from item to item in these tasks.” However, these authors don’t mention that what they call “additional processing time” has to do with the sensitivity of the speaker for how the listener is affected by his or her voice. 

The speaker's sensitivity to the listener occurs only there during Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). However, the effects of the SVB speaker’s voice on the perception and memory of the listener have nothing to do with time, but whether it is perceived as an appetitive stimulus. The listener, who was  conditioned by Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), may actually experience the SVB speaker’s voice as an aversive stimulus, as it doesn’t sound like anything he or she is used to. This is not to say that this cannot be changed, it can, but to build up more SVB repertoire requires a decrease and ideally the extinction of NVB responses. 

These authors reify (make processes into things) when they write about “talker-specific information” which presumably is “retained in memory and can be used as a cue, in addition to linguistic content, to retrieve specific linguistic events from memory.” Certainly, the nervous system of speakers and listeners is altered, that is, conditioned, by spoken communication, due to which they are more likely to respond in a particular way, but “talker-specific information” is an inference which doesn’t explain anything. 

No wonder that “the question still remains, however, as to the relationship between the processing of talker information and the processing of linguistic content.” That question can only be answered if we rephrase it in functional terms. I suggest: is what the speaker says affected by how he or she is saying it? And, could this perhaps be troubling the listener? 

Instead of ‘mentalist’ inferences about “processing of talker-information” and “processing of linguistic information”, we should ask and answer why  SVB produces better outcomes than NVB. If what we say is distracted from by how we say it, then we must prevent NVB and enhance SVB. If reducing NVB and increasing SVB leads to better results this is because how we say things determines whether what we say can or will be understood. How the speaker sounds and whether the speaker engages in SVB or NVB, either prevents or distracts the listener from paying attention to what the speaker is saying or it supports and stimulates the listener to pay attention to what the speaker is saying and to remember it. 

The researcher’s question: “are the perceptual analyses that extract both types of information [talker-identity and linguistic content] integrally linked? (words between brackets added) is coming close to mine. During SVB what we say is congruent with how we say it, but during NVB the speaker produces contradicting messages with what he or she says and how he or she says it. The speaker's congruence also pertains to his or her verbal and nonverbal expression. Furthermore, the SVB speaker's speaking and listening behaviors are joined, that is, they occur at the same rate. Another way of describing this is that during SVB the speaker is conscious of his or her sound. The SVB speaker's voice is produced and listened to in the here and now. In NVB, on the other hand, the speaker is not listening to him or herself and is only busy trying to get others to listen to him or to her. 

Thus, NVB is mechanical, unconscious and uncomfortable speech, which doesn't stimulate the speaker-as-own-listener. Consequently, the NVB speaker separates the speaker from the listener and in doing so separates public speech from private speech. During NVB what we really think and feel is kept out of public speech. We cannot express it as the sensitivity and awareness that is needed to do this is missing. Moreover, as the NVB speaker is not listening to his or her own sound, he or she gets carried away by what he or she is saying without ever realizing how he or she is saying it. In other words, the NVB speaker is heady. He or she is verbally fixated and he or she speaks in a disembodied, dissociated and dis-regulated fashion.

August 10, 2015

August 10, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my tenth response to “Talker-specific learning in speech perception” by Nygaard and Pisoni (1998). "Serial recall of spoken word lists produced by multiple talkers was poorer than recall of lists produced by a single talker; but the result was found only in the primacy portion of the serial recall curve.” These results need to be analyzed in terms of whether the speaker produced Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) or Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and positively influenced the listener with an appetitive sounding voice or an negatively influenced the listener with an aversive sounding voice. 

“The primacy portion of the serial curve” is hypothesized to be absent in SVB and is believed to be mainly be a function of NVB. It was suggested that "variation in a talker’s voice from word to word in a list competes for processing resources in the recall task.” This interpretation doesn’t answer the question why this “competition for processing resources” occurs.  The SVB/NVB distinction, however, makes us realize that this “competition” occurs only due to NVB.

In SVB the verbal and nonverbal expressions of the speaker are aligned, but in NVB they are two different messages as they are disjointed. Moreover, in SVB the speaker is his or her own listener. This always positively effects the feelings of the listener, but in NVB the speaker is not listening to him or herself, which always negatively effects the listener. What is recalled by the listener from an aversive-sounding NVB speaker is mainly that he or she sounds aversive. 

Stated differently, because lexical information dominates and hinders the linguistic analysis of what the speaker says, the listener who listens to a NVB speaker is believed to remember less than the listener who listens to a SVB speaker. Whether it is possible or not, the listener who listens to a NVB speaker will try to move away from the aversive stimulation of the speaker and consequently remember less of the lexical information.

The “analysis of talker information during a memory task appears to be both time- and resource-demanding,” but only when the listener is dealing with a NVB speaker. Reasoned from the SVB/NVB distinction, we find that it is not the “talker variability” which “increases the capacity demands of the working memory system”, but it is SVB which increases this capacity and, by contrast, it is NVB, which decreases this working memory capacity. 

The researchers noted that recall is also affected by presentation rates. They  don’t mention that these, in turn, are determined by the kind of vocal verbal behavior of the speakers, that is, by their SVB or NVB. A SVB speaker's speech episode contains more instances of SVB than NVB, while a NVB speaker's presentation contains more NVB instances than SVB instances. 

The SVB presentation occurs at more relaxed pace and slower rate than the anxiety and stress provoking NVB presentation. Leaving out the influence of the talker’s voice on the listener, the researchers overlook what may be the most important independent variable, which is unspecified in the catch-all-phrase “talker variability.”

Authors unaware of the SVB/NVB distinction will maintain ‘mentalistic’ definitions, which are useless in any behavioral account. 'Talker variability' is a useless term if it doesn't address SVB and NVB. “This interaction between presentation rate and serial recall for the multiple- and single-talker word lists suggests that at fast presentation rates, when processing is constrained by time, talker variability affects both the perceptual encoding and the rehearsal of items in the serial recall task” (words underline by me). 

To consider the influence of the speaker’s sound, we should do away with constructs that represent verbal bias. Conclusions are drawn which prevent us from finding out what is happening. “At slower presentation rates, when listeners have more time and resources to encode and rehearse talker information, they are able to use that information to aid them in the encoding of item and order information.” With a SVB speaker the listener is at ease and better able to pay attention to what he or she is saying. The SVB/NVB distinction is a more parsimonious explanation than inferences about “encoding” and “rehearsing” of the “item and order information”.

Based on my knowledge about SVB and NVB, I object to the researcher’s conclusion. “These memory findings suggest that talker information may not be discarded in the process of spoken word recognition, but rather is retained in memory along with the more abstract, symbolic linguistic content of the utterance.” They seem to think that nebulous cognitive processes explain how “talker information” is “retained in memory.” 

What is left out by these authors is the fact that the listener’s neural behavior is altered by the sound of the speaker's voice, leading one listener to supposedly have better memory than the other. What actually happens is that the body of the listener who ‘remembers’ what the speaker has said was positively affected by the tone of the speaker’s voice. The stress that is produced by the NVB speaker always has an adverse effect on memory. 

If we don’t discard constructs as “information”, we continue to misrepresent classical and operant conditioning effects – in speakers and listeners –  of how the speaker sounds. Presumably “Talker-specific information is retained in memory along with lexical information" and "this information can facilitate listeners’ recognition memory.” SVB and NVB can be heard, but “talker-specific information” and “lexical information”cannot. 

Ironically, the researchers, who found that “Words repeated in the same voice were recognized better than words repeated in a different voice”, didn’t realize that fixation on words, a characteristic of NVB, distracts them from paying attention to how this “same voice” actually sounds.