June 24, 2015

June 24, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my fourth response to “A Rose by Naming: How We May Learn How to Do it” by Greer and Longano (2010). 


I went to the ear, nose and throat doctor because some weeks ago my right ear was clogged up. It had already gone away and everything was fine with my hearing, except for a little high frequency loss which comes with aging. 


The lady who tested my ears told me something remarkable. She had worked in phonological testing for more than thirty years, so she knew what she is talking about. Often when elderly people come in for hearing aids, they are brought in by their family members, who notice that they are having hearing problems.  The nurse mentioned that when people get older they have less and less contacts and therefore they talk less and less. She stated that without interaction our hearing simply atrophies.

What she didn’t talk about, however, was that people also don’t hear themselves when they talk so little with others. Readers of my writings know we don’t hear ourselves very much anyway, even if we have people to talk with all day. Most conversation is Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the speaker doesn’t hear him or herself while he or she speaks. This is because in NVB the speaker wants to make the listener listen to him or to her.

Stated bluntly, in NVB the speaker forces the listener to listen. In NVB speakers don't listen to themselves process. This process is further enhanced by the aging process when the chances to do so become slimmer and slimmer. Thus, old age is for most of us a period of decreasing opportunity for auditory stimulation. 

The nurse also told me that when elderly folks are brought in to have their hearing checked or to get a hearing aid, they often have great trouble adjusting to the hearing aid, that is, to the overwhelming amount of sounds they are now able to perceive. Not surprisingly, this leads old people to become stressed out and to not put in their hearing aid. A lot of coaching and gradually getting used to the hearing aid is needed. Another interesting observation of the talkative nurse was that once people are using their hearing aid, their hearing improves upon later testing. By having the hearing aid, they are using their user-dependent ears again, which then improve. I asked if this was always the case and she answered with an unequivocal yes. This means that older people can actually regain at least some of their hearing. 

One can only begin to imagine what would be the positive outcome if elderly folks were more often exposed to opportunities to talk and stimulated into increased social engagement. Most likely, the incidence of hearing loss would drop dramatically. 

I was reminded of an old couple I once worked with. The hard-of-hearing, moody and suspicious husband was driving his wife  nuts. Their daughter heard them bickering all the time. The wife, who was tired of having to repeat herself a million times, didn’t sound very nice to her husband. In fact, she sounded quite harsh and negative. I asked her to listen to herself while she spoke with him. Then a miracle happened. He immediately let her know that he could hear and understand her very well as she was speaking with a kinder, calmer and less controlling voice. As I coached her to not aversively influence her husband, she felt that now she had become the problem. And so we only had one session.

Another occasion came to mind which I will never forget. I was having dinner at the house of a friend. We were seated around a big table. There were at least fourteen people, including my friend’s old hard-of-hearing mother. There was a lot of talking going on. When I spoke, the old lady suddenly blurted out to me “Young man, this is unusual, I can’t understand anything of what these people are saying, but how is it possible I can hear you perfectly well?” This incident happened twenty five years ago.

While seated in the ENT office I read an article about the neuroscientist, Rebecca Saxe, who studied why people disagree. She looked at the ‘hard’ evidence, that is, at how the brain responds under circumstances of agreeing and disagreeing and she figured out that agreement would only occur when the party who has the power was willing to take the perspective of the party who doesn’t have the power. Perspective taking by the party who doesn’t have any power doesn’t make any sense.   


This applies to the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In SVB we are at our most sensitive as we listen to ourselves and each other. In SVB, we listen because we can listen as our talking is not preventing it. Many of us think that listening to each other is difficult, but it is not. The absence of doing anything makes us listen, but we are that way only if we feel safe. Listening happens without any effort and SVB speaking is also effortless.  

In the Scientific American, I read an article about “sonification of data: converting data that were otherwise displayed visually or numerically into sound.” It appears that our “ears are such terrific pattern-finders that scientists are now using audio data to detect cancer cells from particles from space.” This is possible because our ears “can detect changes in a sound that occur after just a few milliseconds.” Seeing happens at a much slower pace, because “the eyes limit for detecting a flickering light is about 50 to 60 times per second.” This is fascinating as “sonification” has been used to “listen to data” of “solar and cancer activity” and “examine the eruptions of vulcanoes and to discern pattens of changes in particles linked to cosmic microwave background, the radiation left over from the Big Bang.” Of course, the Geiger counter has already been around since 1908 and “emits clicks in the presence of energetic particles.” All this evidence tells me there is hope that eventually we will all be listening while we speak.

The “sound-file has been a revelation” because “ a year’s worth of field measurements which would take months to analyze by eye [bar graphs & pie charts], thus become two hours of sound” (words between brackets added). Bechara Saab , a Swiss neuroscientist addressed the brain mechanisms involved. He says “the ear can pick out subtle patterns” because “a mammal’s auditory system is faster at transmitting neural signals than most other parts of the brain. This system holds the largest known connection between neurons, a giant synapse called calyx of Held. This flower-shaped junction transforms sound waves into spikes in neuron activity; to do so the calyx can release neurotransmitters – the brain’s messengers – 800 times a second.” Our eyes are much slower than our ears. 


Saab emphasizes “in the end these differences in mechanics mean that stimuli that would be “invisible’ to the eye could be easily picked up by the ear.” Not surprisingly, “although sonification offers advantages over visual display” these neuro-sound specialists “face a major hurdle: simply getting researchers to try this new way of exploring data.” This goes right along with our fixation on the verbal in NVB. 


Words, images and diagrams, prevent us from listening. Listening, on the other hand, doesn’t prevent us from seeing. Many people have told me they see things more clearly since they have discovered SVB. Furthermore, they agree that seeing is impaired by NVB. I am reminded of the saying that someone couldn't see the forest for the trees. “From elementary school onward we’re surrounded by visual representations.” We have been and we continue to be conditioned by visual stimuli, which overrule the importance of auditory stimuli. Reality shrank to images on I-Phones, which presumably represent the world.

Scientists, who read and write more than talk and listen, are biased towards the verbal and to bar graphs and pie charts. “By the time someone becomes a scientist, they have a syntax, they have an understanding of how these plots function and a sort of internal logic, whereas if you push ‘play’ and listen to the data for the first time, you don’t have a vocabulary, so you don’t really have a basis for comparison.” The big challenge remains: how do we talk about our scientific findings and will someone be able to listen? Wouldn’t it be much simpler if researchers realized that the reason people don’t listen is because of the vocal verbal behavioral pattern called NVB? SVB arranges a totally different pattern of auditory data and we use different words as well. We would be able to make enormous progress if we would aim to create stable SVB environments in which we controlled for NVB. 

Now I will respond to “A Rose by Naming: How We May Learn How to Do it” by Greer and Longano (2010). The authors explain the “Multipel-Examplar Instruction” (MEI), in which “multiple responses are learned for single stimuli and variants. That is, an observational instance results in stimulus control for both listener and speaker responding. Initially the response may be one (e.g. a tact) that produces the stimulus for the other response (e.g. a listener response), but eventually the original stimulus evokes both responses.” 

This made me think about how I learned about SVB. I have always been drawn to people who have a lot of SVB and was always repulsed by people who have a lot of NVB. Over the course of my life I have become more selective and I choose mainly for people who have already a lot of SVB. When I began to explore SVB, it was on my own by talking aloud with myself. I gave attention to whatever asked my attention and I would talk about anything that I could think of. Therefore, my attention would jump from something I thought, felt, remembered, saw, said, heard, moved, smelled or touched. I didn't seek to analyze what I said, but would describe whatever was in my attention and I felt that this made it easy for me to listen to myself. By not editing what I was saying I found my own sound, which expressed my relaxation, well-being and meditation. Although of course I produced lots of NVB, I was able to get back to SVB quicker and quicker, to the point where just thinking about it was enough for me to have it. At this point, I am not even trying to have it anymore. I have it so often that it has become part of my life. 

What made the biggest difference for me, however, was when I stopped having contact with my family. Their negative feedback had been so problematic, but since I have kept them out of my life I have doing better than ever before. I am happier without my family. My ability to express and listen to what I think and feel, made me realize I found a treasure, which needs protection.

June 23, 2015

June 23, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my third response to “A Rose by Naming: How We May Learn How to Do it” by Greer and Longano (2010). I just woke up from a restful long sleep. I had a dream about my estranged brother. He was wearing his police uniform, but I hugged him. Yesterday, while writing a cover letter for my job application for counselor of veterans, I had been thinking of him. The letter had come out nicely and I will complete this job application today. I was laughing with my brother and saying how odd it was that yesterday he still hated me, rejected me and didn’t want to see me or talk with me, but now we were amazingly brothers again.

Our next-door neighbor was also there and approved of our reunion as if she herself had arranged it. May be she did? We need to talk with her as we are going to have our house painted this week. The painters need to have access to her property because our house is adjacent to hers. She is not happy as we are having the house painted in a yellow color she didn’t approve. It is called Chinese Lantern. We had coffee with her the other day and when we brought up the painting of our house, she urged us to paint it in the grey colors that she likes. Of course, we are going to paint our house the way we like it and we look forward to seeing the combination of colors which we have chosen. 

 

“It appears that learning a word-object relation in both the listener and speaker function constitutes what is referred to in lexicons as “becoming acquainted…with the essentials of an unfamiliar object or topic.” The learning process of “Naming” Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) requires us to experience it. With Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) we always over-emphasize the importance of information and we underestimate the importance of what we experience while we speak. During NVB we are on automatic pilot. The ability to catch ourselves with NVB and to stop it develops gradually after sufficient experiences have happened in which we could take note of the difference between SVB and NVB. 

Every time we go back to SVB, we experience something different from what we have had before. It is mostly in retrospect that we realize that we were having NVB again. During SVB everyone’s experiences are of equal importance, but during NVB, one person’s experiences are supposedly more important than others.   

NVB is determined by hierarchical relationship in which one person tells the other person how it is. This means one person can curb, distract and oppress the language capabilities of another person. A person may have learned to name and discriminate SVB, but he or she may still be stopped from having SVB by one person with NVB. Even if an entire group has acquired the ability to “name” SVB and NVB and is able to discriminate these two universal subsets of vocal verbal behavior, it only takes  one person with NVB to make the production of SVB impossible. 

It is should be clear to the reader how subtle SVB is and how blunt, destructive and ubiquitous NVB is. If one musician in an orchestra plays a wrong note the conductor and other musicians hear this. Due to experience they are capable of that. One wrong note can destroy the music. The community of musicians, like the community of speakers, concurs “a speaker [who] sees an object and says a word [the musician reads the music score and plays the right note]” (words between brackets added). Furthermore, the community of musicians has, due to their musical training, a greater sensitivity to sound than any other verbal community.  Verbal communities with a cultural history of classical music are more likely to engender more subtle verbal behavior. I grew up in Holland and I studied classical singing for many years. This set the stage for my discovery of SVB. Due to singing I became intrigued by the sound with which I speak.

The importance of “naming”, what Skinner referred to as “tacting”, is not only about a child’s “ability to learn language”, but also about an adult’s possibility to have SVB, that is, great conversation. “Tacts involve saying or signing the word (a tact) in the presences of nonverbal, visual, auditory olfactory or gustatory stimuli under control of general social reinforcers.” Likewise, SVB is under joint control of multiple variables, which can only be discriminated while we are engaging in it. 

“Skinner describes the listener and the speaker as two initially independent repertoires and there is evidence that these two repertoires initially develop independently during language development.” Given the fact of the independent development of listening and speaking repertoires, it is, as with any other independently learned behavior, important that at some point these behaviors become integrated with other behaviors. I concur with the authors who state that the “two independently evolved functions” are “joined by cultural contingencies”, but I believe that in some cultures more joining goes on between listening and speaking than in others. It is apparent to me that in Dutch conversation there is a greater connection between listening and speaking behavior, a more developed congruence between verbal and nonverbal behavior than in American conversation. 

There is more SVB in Holland than in America. I am reading this paper about language development in children, but my writing is about language development of adults.  “Before the listener and speaker are joined, mastery of the listener and speaker responses in the presence of the same stimulus requires separate and direct instruction.” To be able to tact SVB and NVB the same process is necessary for adults. “The environmental sources of Naming” SVB and NVB has to be a capable teacher, who reminds NVB communicators to listen to themselves while they speak, who reinforces SVB and who extinguishes NVB. 

“When children cannot acquire both listener and speaker responses by observation of others tacting the stimulus, they lack Naming as a behavioral developmental cusp.” Let’s be upfront about the fact that we don’t know how to get along as we don't really know how to talk with one another. Everyone is having communication problems everywhere and things are only getting worse. The adult-behavioral cusp to listen to ourselves while we speak, which is what makes SVB possible, was never taught or reinforced. Certainly, we have learned to say shoe when someone showed us a shoe and we know many words, but we have never been instructed to pay attention to the sound of our voice while we speak. Thus, listening for most of us equals listening to someone else. Many new reinforcing communication experiences are possible when we speak and listen to ourselves, but these reinforcing, more intelligent conversations become possible only if our environment supports SVB and extinguishes NVB. 

As we have learned to speak and listen separately, we go on our entire life missing out on the exquisite possibility of speaking and listening simultaneously. The worst part of our stunted development is that we are occasionally in environments in which SVB is possible. Whenever we are at ease and relaxed, as we would be with our friends, family or people who are friendly and supportive to us, we will have SVB, our natural way of speaking. Oddly, these moments haunt us because we don’t know how to create while we talk the situation in which we can continue to be completely at ease with one another. If we knew that, we would have SVB, but we don’t know and that’s why we have NVB. 

If “Naming” is characterized as “a higher order verbal operant that is one of several verbal behavioral developmental stages that have been identified experimentally in several studies” then the “Naming” of SVB and NVB must occur with utmost urgency.  Everyone who has acknowledged the SVB/NVB distinction has agreed that they acquired a valuable “behavioral cusp”, that is, a dramatic change and improvement in repertoire, which allowed them to “come in contact with parts of the environment they could not contact prior to the acquisition of the cusp.” In its magnitude it is comparable to learning how to walk or speak.  

 “Once [an adult] can learn from observing others receive instruction [on SVB and NVB], he or she not only observes the responses and consequences received by others but learns what those he or she has observed learn” (word in brackets added). Familiarity with the SVB/NVB distinction gives people the “ability to learn from different forms of contact with the contingencies of reinforcement and punishment.”  

Once the SVB/NVB distinction has been made clear, NVB, which before learning about this distinction was accepted as normal, is  experienced as punishing, while SVB will bring many new forms of reinforcement to us which were previously unavailable. Moreover, once the SVB/NVB distinction has been acquired, many experiences are interpreted in a different, more positive manner and will be recognized as “prerequisite behaviors” which were never before properly put into context. While learning SVB, people often discover that what they struggled the most with was the fact that they already knew about it. It was due to their high rates of NVB that they were unable to properly articulate it. 

When children “could not progress verbally, in listener or speaker repertoires, the investigations sought procedures to overcome the developmental obstacle that thwarted learning.” It was found that “the obstacles" which "appeared to be missing" were "developmental cusps,” especially the cusp called “Naming.” By engineering the procedures that helped children to overcome these obstacles to learning, the authors came close to SVB without knowing it. 

Only in SVB will the speaker and listener repertoires become and remain perfectly joined. Of course, this merging of speaking and listening behavior extends throughout our lives. We diagnose autistic children, but how about all those people, who have learned to how to listen, speak, read and write, but who still can’t talk with each other? Doesn’t mankind have a great communication problem? The answer is yes! Denying this is just more NVB. Pretending that we generally have great conversation is NVB. 

We don’t even know what it is like to talk positively with one another. We may know how to occasionally, accidentally have it, but for the most part, we don’t know how to continue with it. Only SVB creates the environmental support that is needed to continue our positive interactions, because after learning the behavioral cusp called SVB, we can learn from the environment, that is, from each other in ways that we could not before. For both NVB and autism we can say “no further learning was possible in this realm.” In NVB “we lack the necessary ability to contact the experience or the capability to learn from the experience.”

June 22, 2015

June 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my second response to “A Rose by Naming: How We May Learn How to Do it” by Greer and Longano (2010). I just came back from my friend Tanya, who puts videos of me on YouTube. We were walking over the Chico State University campus, trying to find the right environment. After checking out several places we ended up in front of a redwood tree. The recording went well and was finished within minutes. It brought home the important message that we don’t cause our own behavior, but that different environments cause us to behave the way we do.

In yesterday’s writing I was quoting the authors who wrote “naming is one of the three types of speaker-as-own-listener behavior.” I wrote about the second one “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud”, but didn’t go into the third one “correspondence between saying and doing.” 

In SVB saying equals doing, but in NVB there is a difference between the two. Similarly, in SVB, speaking is listening and listening is also, as Schlinger (2008) has reported, behaving verbally. However, in NVB, the speaker speaks at the listener, not with him or her as the speaker creates the illusion that he or she is separate from the listener. Separation of the speaker and the listener goes hand in hand with the false notion that individuals cause their own behavior. Due to SVB, the process of “naming” is “learned without instruction”, but due to NVB, due to coercive ways of talking, at an early age problems begin to occur as this important skill of "naming" will not be properly acquired.

Due to SVB, children at around age 3 experience “an explosion in vocabulary”, which was previously believed not to be “attributable to direct instruction,” but recent behavioral research “supports the notion that the mechanisms for children’s learning of words the things incidentally is, in fact, traceable to instructional histories and the ensuing stimulus control that lead to Naming as a, or the source of incidental language learning.” 

The lack of correspondence  between saying and doing, which co-occurs with the separation between the speaker and listener, is characteristic for NVB, because in NVB the speaker forces the listener to do as he or she says. In SVB, by contrast, the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an appetitive, a positively reinforcing contingency and correspondence between saying and doing occurs as naturally as water flowing down. 

Absence of correspondence is an indication that NVB was going on. The not-doing or the occurrence of what is considered to be the inappropriate response is explained as by me as counter-control to NVB.  This brings us to the issue of iatrogenic effects. Due to NVB, which is as ubiquitous in mental health as anywhere else, many people are continuously harmed and re-traumatized by the very treatment that is supposed to alleviate their symptoms. 

Many students in my Principles of Psychology class have mental health issues or have family members who struggle. After they learn about SVB they realize how little SVB they have gotten from those who were supposedly helping them. They realize they were mistreated over and over again. To put this in perspective, NVB is everywhere, in parenting, nursing, teaching and in work situations. As it is happening everywhere It is not the fault of anyone in mental health that people are not getting the help they need. As long as SVB is not taught in colleges and universities we are not the getting the education we need, we are not getting the parental care we need, we are not getting the medical care we need and, we are not getting the leadership or government we need. The order of society will be changed by SVB. The disorder was a result of NVB. Diagnosing a person with a disorder is stigmatizing and ineffective, but talking about disordered environments leads to recovery from NVB.  

The child, but also the adult, must have “Naming experiences” in which “a child and a caregiver [or teacher and student] are simultaneously looking at, or in some other way sensing, a stimulus (referred to by other developmental psychologists as joint-attention) as a caregiver [or teacher] produces a vocal or signed response in the presence of a stimulus (e.g. an object).” 

Likewise, a learning process is involved in differentiating between SVB and NVB. If given enough time I can teach any adult about this distinction. Sensing SVB is more important than understanding it. Questions about SVB arise always in the absence of experiencing it. We are not experiencing SVB when we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak, that is, when our environment is aversive and we remain on guard. 

Although SVB can be seen, listening is of course of greater importance. However, listening is not our usual listening to others, but listening to ourselves. As will become clear in SVB, self-listening includes other-listening, but our previous focus on other-listening excluded self-listening. In NVB, we fail to listen to others as we are not listening to ourselves. We cannot listen to others if we are not listening to ourselves. If we are forced to listen to others, as we are in NVB, we cannot really listen to them and therefore we can only pretend to be listening. 

The best way to learn about the distinction between SVB and NVB is by “Naming” the voice of the SVB speaker, an appetitive stimulus or Voice II and the voice of the punitive stimulus, the aversive-sounding speaker, Voice I. The voice of the SVB speaker is Voice II and the voice of the NVB speaker is called Voice I. Unless we recognize Voice I, we cannot and will not recognize Voice II. Ideally, this distinction is learned in childhood.

The previously mentioned “joint-attention” which “requires both the auditory stimulus of the word that is spoken by the caregiver and the child attending to another feature of the stimulus” is also needed to learn SVB. When I teach about SVB, I explain what it is and then the student tries it out. When the student produces Voice II, I say this is Voice II, but when he or she produces Voice I, I say that is Voice I. It only takes a couple of such trials before the student is able to recognize NVB as NVB and SVB as SVB. This illustrates that the student already has a behavioral history in which he or she learned about SVB and NVB, but it only wasn’t named that way. Now that these universal subsets of vocal verbal behavior have got their name, things begin to  fall into place while experimenting with the great difference between SVB and NVB. Students are stimulated to explore the different features of Voice I and Voice II. Also, as part of this naming process, many circumstances are discussed and revisited in which the student was involved in a SVB or NVB conversation and a contextual understanding emerges as to why it happened. 

“Speaker-as-own-listener behavior” requires 1) “naming” and 2)  “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud” and 3)“correspondence between saying and doing.” The “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud” requires reinforcement to get it going. As adults learning about the SVB/NVB distinction students start with speaking and then they begin to take note of when they are listening and when they are not listening to themselves while they speak. As a teacher I enhance their ability to listen to themselves. Somewhere during this process students often remark things like “so, are you saying that when I am tense I am not listening to myself?” I then simply say to them: “I am not saying it, you are saying it” and then they usually get it. Suddenly they hear themselves and they realize the speaker-as-own-listener. 

When this learning process occurs in a group, other students who go through similar experiences serve as a good example.  This enhances the accuracy with which others are able to recognize SVB and NVB in themselves and each other. When someone speaks and I ask the others if they recognize it as Voice I or Voice II, they learn quickly. Students are also encouraged to stop me if I produce NVB. I then remove myself from where I was lecturing and when I produce SVB they have learned about the difference between the two. Certainly, this brings out negative and positive emotions, which are involved in NVB and SVB, but during this “Naming” process there is no need to delve into these emotions, that is, by thinking about these emotions a “multiple stimulus control” for SVB and NVB is created. What can then be called ‘conditioned listening’ involves “many speaker and listener bidirectional components of Naming.” Furthermore, “naming” of SVB and NVB not only results in “multiple stimulus control, it also results in multiple responses.” In SVB we all come alive.  

While learning about SVB and NVB students hone in on “role of environmental experiences.” Similarly to teaching children with autism spectrum disorders, who “would not have talked (or used substitute productive language), each new speaker often needs to be taught by direct reinforcement and correction” (underlining added). The speaking done with the purpose to hear ourselves, the integration of our private speech in public speech, has not been reinforced and will only occur if it is reinforced. Unlike those with autism spectrum disorders, we have talked, but it was mainly NVB and we haven’t had ongoing SVB. The reason we didn’t have it was because nobody taught it or could teach it. The environmental support was only there in moments of friendship, togetherness, trust and respect.  Learning SVB requires reinforcement of a student’s speaking and listening behavior.

To speak with the sole purpose to listen to it is a different way of speaking than the way of talking that we are used to, in which we speak to make others listen to us. If we don’t speak there is nothing to listen to, but if we speak, we are usually having NVB, because we don’t listen to our sound while we speak. In SVB, however, we speak and simultaneously we listen ourselves. “Naming results in the exponential expansion of vocabulary, or more specifically, the joining of the listener and speaker functions for observed stimuli.” This is joining creates SVB.

June 21, 2015

June 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In “A Rose by Naming: How We May Learn How to Do it” by Greer and Longano (2010) the authors write about what “naming” means in the analysis of verbal behavior. The meaning of “naming” is as we usually understand it, except that “in the analysis of verbal behavior the integration of behavioral processes involved is identified as a particular higher order verbal operant that is an important milestone in a language development.” “Naming” also involves “integration of the initially separate listener and speaker responses.” 

I am interested in “naming” as Horne and Lowe (1996) wrote about it as “the beginning of becoming truly verbal, because it fused the listener and speaker functions” (underlining added). I discovered that in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) “beginning” of merging “listener and speaker functions” finally matures. In SVB the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. 

In Verbal Behavior (1957) Skinnner had already described the process of “naming” as “speaker-as-own-listener.” When a child learns to say shoe, he or she does so because as a listener he or she responds to a speaker, who says shoe in the presence of a shoe. The child learns to respond to shoe with the word shoe and when someone else says shoe, the child knows what it is. 

These responses happen under different circumstances and thus, listening and speaking behaviors were acquired at different times. The saying “waiting for the other shoe to drop”, derived from a living situation in which one person is awakened by an upstairs neighbor, who is taking off his shoes and drops them on the floor. Interestingly, the person who was woken up, first is a listener, but then becomes a speaker. However, this listener had already acquired the word shoe and so the saying came about naturally and “without any instruction.” 


Another way of thinking about this is that the listener was talking with him or herself, while being annoyed by the regular noise he endures from his upstairs neighbor. Proper use of this saying involves more than only the shoe and comes about when the “speaker-as-own-listener” describes to him or herself what is happening and subsequently waits for the other shoe to drop. This private speech is essential to SVB, because in only SVB the mature adult, who knows that a shoe is a shoe and a spade a spade, can become more complex in his or her use of language. 

I have verified and explored with thousands of individuals that there are basically only two ways in which we talk: one is called SVB and the other is called Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Once we listen to ourselves while we speak, we are embarrassed by the fact that we seldom do this. In NVB speaking and listening behaviors are out of sync and disjointed. When we don’t listen while we speak, we actually neither listen nor do we really speak. 

 

Our talking has become so superficial, because in most of our verbal episodes we are not a “speaker-as-own-listener”, that is, most of our interactions are NVB and only very few are SVB.

Only if we name it that way will it change, but since we haven’t even done that, we keep beating around the bush. SVB exists and since it is defined as the “speaker-as-own-listener”, it is key to “the advancement of a science of verbal behavior.” 

If we want to have a complete account of verbal behavior, we need to have, as Skinner once emphasized, “separate but interlocking accounts of both speaker and listener” (underlining added. This interlocking account must necessarily be able to emerge while we speak. Writing and reading about “speaker-as-own-listener” is not the same as talking about this very important topic.

Greer and Longano, who look at children’s verbal development, emphasize “Naming seems to have been overlooked.” Indeed, without being able to name things children are unable to learn language. I look at adult’s verbal development and I observe that without being able to name and discriminate SVB and NVB, we remain unaware, mechanical and insensitive in each one of our conversations. Certainly, for children “Naming is foundational to more advanced verbal development, including how to read and write” and to development of “functions such as intraverbals”, but “naming" is also important for adults as it is necessary for becoming a conscious and mature communicator. 

Shouldn’t adults know how to “name” and differentiate the difference between the pretension of talking (NVB) and real talking (SVB)? The only reason we don’t think there is real talking is because we have gotten away with our NVB. There has to be a process as real talking. The extent to which our talking is real determines what we are able to accomplish with it. However, since most of our talking is NVB, we are not accomplishing many happy, healthy and supportive relationships. For that SVB is needed. Certainly, we accomplish many other things, but all of that is achieved at the expense of our relationships.

Horne and Lowe (1996) have defined “naming” as becoming acquainted with the “essentials of an unfamiliar object or topic.”  It is awkward for adults to admit that they are “unfamiliar” with something so common as talking and listening. It may seem as if we know, but when we look into why we have such high rates of NVB and such low rates of SVB, it is obvious while we talk that most of our attention goes to our speaking behavior and hardly any attention goes to our listening behavior. 


The reason for this great discrepancy is that in NVB the speaker aversively controls the behavior of the listener. In NVB, we are and we have to be on guard. We don’t and we can’t let our guard down as we feel continuously threatened, attacked, intimidated, pushed around, dominated and coerced. As most of our attention goes to speaking, we don’t and can’t create, let alone maintain, the safe environments in which SVB will occur. 

“Fusion of speaker and listener within the individual” will reliably occur if we “name” and identify, that is, experience, SVB. The experience that the speaker can in fact be his or her own listener is new to anyone who is introduced to SVB. Although many people recognize it as a possibility, it is new in that they have never experienced continuous support for it. 


We know SVB instances from being with friends, loved ones and people we care about and who care about us. However, we have at best achieved only a few moments of SVB, which happened accidentally, but we were unable to have SVB deliberately, consciously, skillfully and knowingly. “Integration of the listener and the speaker repertoires of human behavior” requires a unique environment, one which is free of aversive stimulation. 

Interestingly, the authors write about “naming” as “one of three types of speaker-as-own-listener behavior.”  The other two are “self-talk rotating speaker and listener responses aloud” and “correspondence between saying and doing.”  Yet, the authors have only thought about “when a young child rotates speaker and listener roles during solitary play” (underlining added). In SVB, adults rotate speaker and listener roles, while talking aloud with others, but they can also have SVB by themselves. 

“Typically developing 5-year-olds emitted distinct speaker and listener responses as they talked aloud to themselves while playing” (underlining added), when they feel safe. The same is true for adults; it is only when we feel safe enough with one another that the contingency is created and maintained in which SVB reliably occurs. The absence of playfulness in our way of talking is our response to an aversive environment. 

Usually, other people are that environment. The existentialist Jean-Paul Sarte correctly stated “Hell is other people” in his play called “No Exit.” However, it is not simply other people, who cause us to feel a particular way, it is our relationship with them or rather the lack of it, which determines that we end having NVB. 


In 1965, Sarte explained in a speech which preceded performance of his play that his statement “hell is other people” has often been misunderstood. He said “it has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I meant that if relations with someone else are twisted , vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves… we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgement always enters, but that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each of us. “ Sarte sounds like a behaviorist!

Sarte gives an analysis which is in tune with SVB. To the extent that private speech is a function of NVB public speech, we are stuck with a judgment of ourselves, with negative self-talk. He  said that blaming others was not what he meant. He referred to the disconnect which occurs within the “speaker-as-own-listener.” When Sarte points to “someone else judgments” he acknowledges the gap between the speaker and the listener. Obviously, “twisted and vitiated relationships” cause this gap, while supportive and positive relationships will close this gap. 

The “other” who Sarte refers to in his quotation, is “that by which we define ourselves, and the punishment of his three characters is that they will only ever be able to define themselves through the distorting mirrors of other people who reflect them badly, while at the same time they see themselves reflected badly in others as well” (Woodward, 2010). Thus, the existential crisis Sarte talks about is brought about by NVB, but can be solved by SVB.

Estelle, one of the characters in Sarte’s play says “When I can’t see myself in the mirror, I can’t even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all. Inez promises to be an accurate mirror for Estelle in order to seduce her. Sarte used the idea of the mirror to great effect in the play – there are none in hell, and in order to see themselves, as it were from the outside, the characters have to rely on the way that others see them” (Woodward, 2010)(underlining added).  Our covert private speech is a behavior which is caused by the overt public speech of others, who are our environment.