August 8, 2015

August 8, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my eight response to  “Talker-specific learning in speech perception” by Nygaard and Pisoni (1998). “The human voice conveys a considerable amount of information about a speaker’s physical, social, and psychological characteristics, and these aspects of speech, referred to as indexical information, complement the processing of linguistic content during spoken communication.” 

A speaker’s voice produces Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) or Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and this “indexical information” about the speaker conveys to the listener, whether he or she is safe or not. Since there is no aversive stimulation of the listener by the speaker during SVB, SVB is the spoken communication of safety. In NVB, by contrast, the speaker’s voice is experienced as a noxious stimulus, which aversively affects the listener. 

During NVB the speaker threatens the listener. Only during SVB can these indexical effects be separated from the linguistic content, but during NVB they contradict the content or distract from it. As the listener is affectively influenced by the sound of the speaker’s voice, it is important to detect whether the speaker induces positive or negative emotions in the listener. 

Since each speaker is also his or her own listener, the speaker-as-own-listener must make sure whether he or she is not producing a sound with which he or she makes him or herself feel unsafe. It is hypothesized that the paranoid schizophrenic produces his or her own paranoid affect, that is, the covert speech of the paranoid schizophrenic is considered to be an effect of the overt NVB speech of others. Thus, NVB private speech is a result of NVB public speech. Moreover, the paranoid schizophrenic is believed to be stuck with his or her own negative self-talk, which distracts from and often completely negates public speech. Similarly, a bipolar person’s mania, a depressed person’s isolative behavior or an obsessed person’s fear of germs, is a function of NVB self-talk, which is conditioned by NVB public speech. 

The only way to remedy negative NVB self-talk, which, due to different phylogenetic, ontogenetic and cultural variables is expressed differently by different people, is to join listening and speaking behaviors, that is, to listen and speak simultaneously and to produce SVB. ‘Mental illness’ therefore is construed as a listener’s response to NVB, which can only be remediated by SVB in which an individual's listening and speaking behaviors are joined. 

In practice this means that the listener must be speaking in order to be able to hear him or herself. Based on the SVB/NVB distinction, the goal of every therapist should be to shape speaker-as-own-listener behaviors in patients. When given the opportunity to do so, that is, when appropriately stimulated to express him or herself, the ‘mentally ill’ listener will be again capable of recognizing if he or she experiences the speaker as threatening or not.  


“These psychological factors are readily perceived when anger, depression, or happiness is recognized in a speaker’s voice.” The fact that this listener’s ability is not learned and is causing all sorts of problems, which, from a behavioral perspective can be accounted for as the separation of speaking and listening behavior, has always been downplayed by the NVB speakers. 


Many so-called ‘mental health problems’ would never exist if speakers, therapists and psychiatrists included, would notice how their coercive voice negatively affects the listener. “In everyday conversation, the indexical properties of the speech signal become quite important as perceivers use this information to govern their own speaking styles and responses.” 


When a listener is repeatedly exposed to or involved in NVB he or she will be conditioned to produce NVB. ”From more permanent characteristics of a speaker’s voice that provide information about identity to the short-term vocal changes related to emotion or “tone of voice,” indexical information contributes to the overall interpretation of a speaker’s utterance.” 


The meaning of what the speaker says is found most importantly in how he or she sounds. If it doesn’t resemble how the listener was conditioned to sound it will make no sense to him or her. NVB has conditioned listeners with coercive behavioral control. A listener thus conditioned would only be able to respond to a forceful and demanding voice of a NVB speaker.   

August 7, 2015

August 7, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writing is my seventh response to “Talker-specific learning in speech perception” by Nygaard and Pisoni (1998). I agree with the authors that “the abstractionist approach to speech perception and spoken language recognition” which “ suggests that the traditional view of perceptual normalization and its long-standing emphasis on the search for abstract, canonical linguistic units as the endpoint of perception may need to be reconsidered or abandoned entirely.” However, this is only likely going to happen if we change the way in which we talk. 

Only if we recognize the “abstractionist approach” as representing Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) will we be able to replace it with Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Although it is encouraging to read that “Over the last few years, a number of researchers have demonstrated that stimulus variability is a rich source of information that is encoded and stored in memory

along with the linguistic content of a talker’s utterance", this doesn’t result into the new SVB way of talking. It makes a few of the experts read and write more about talking, but it doesn’t and it can’t do anything to increase talking, or, more precisely, to increase SVB and to decrease NVB. 

The finding that speech perception “employs highly detailed and specific encodings of speech which preserve many attributes of the acoustic signal” only makes sense while we speak. It cannot, it was not and it will not be expressed in NVB. If we are going to express this knowledge appropriately while we talk, we must learn to have SVB. As we haven’t learned to create and maintain SVB and as we are only beginning to become aware of its possibility, it is crucially important that this writing results into speaking, because if it doesn’t, it will only further enhance NVB, which perpetuates the separation between speaker and listener, organism and environment. 

August 6, 2015

August 6, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my sixth response to“Talker-specific learning in speech perception” by Nygaard and Pisoni (1998). These researchers give a good example of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) by stating that “variation” in “talker identity” is “assumed to be stripped away so that the listener can arrive at canonical representations that underlie further linguistic analysis.” 

Lack of variation and rigidity of “talker identity” goes hand in hand with "the assumption that the end product of perception is a series of abstract, symbolic, idealized, linguistic units." This assumption is from the NVB talker’s superior point of view. These authors call it “the abstractionist's approach to speech perception.” I totally agree with them that this approach, with “its emphasis on context-free processing units, falls short of providing a satisfactory explanation for the relationship between the processing of linguistic content and the analysis of a talker’s voice," by the listener.

We must focus on how the speaker sounds, because that determines if we (talkers as well as listeners) will engage in SVB or NVB. “A separate body of research has addressed the perception and identification of talker identity, viewing the speech signal as simply a carrier of talker information.” This so-called "perception" is in reality a form of dissociation in the listener. 

During NVB, the listener has no other choice than to try to separate what is said from how it is said, so that the NVB speaker can continue to dominate and intimidate him or her. If the listener would not be doing this, he or she would be punished by the speaker for not listening or for being distracted. 

However, by connecting “talker information” with listener’s perception, that is, by joining speaking and listening behavior or by listening to ourselves while we speak, we will attain SVB. These researchers should consider it to be a NVB assumption that “talker identification and perception” must involve “a distinct set of perceptual mechanisms which operate on attributes of the acoustic speech signal that are separate and autonomous from the attributes that underlie spoken word recognition of the linguistic message.”

August 5, 2015

August 5, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my fifth response to “Talker-specific learning in speech perception” by L.C. Nygaard and D.B. Pisoni (1998). The reason that “traditionally” the “perception of linguistics concepts of speech —the words, phrases, and sentences of an utterance — has been studied separately from the perception of talker identity” is because of what I call Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), our usual way of talking in which this separation is created and maintained. Perhaps I should say ‘imagined and believed’, because NVB is always based on fictitious knowledge. 

“Talker identity” has not been given much attention. If we did that, we would have to acknowledge that in most our so-called interactions the speaker is aversively affecting the listener. To focus on “talker identity” requires that we take a listener’s perspective of the speaker. This would make us realize that the “perception of linguistic concepts of speech” is not, for the most part, determined by the listener, but by the speaker. 

In NVB the speaker can blame the listener for not understanding him or her. In SVB, by contrast, it is not the adjustment of the listener to the speaker, but it is the adjustment of the speaker to the listener, which makes the speech more effective. The authors write that “variability” in “talker identity” is considered to be “a perceptual problem that listeners must solve if they are to recover the linguistic constituents that carry meaning." This view elevates the speaker above the listener and relieves him or her of having to think about why he or she may not be understood. 

Only during NVB listeners are always blamed for not listening, for not paying attention, for not being obedient to the speaker, but nobody talks about the important, completely ignored fact that NVB speakers are not listening to themselves while they speak. Once we look into the “talking identity” of the NVB speaker, we find that he or she demands that others listen to him or to her, as he or she lacks the skill to listen to him or herself.