March 3, 2015

March 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

During Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) the phylogenetically determined neural musculature of a speaker makes production of sound possible, which we shall call Voice I, which is reinforced by listeners, whose bodies have been conditioned so that they mainly reinforce and maintain NVB. In NVB, the listener’s neural behavior, activates  private speech or thinking, which, to the extent that the listener was conditioned by Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), distracts from the speaker’s public speech. In NVB, the listener will only be permitted to speak, to the extent that he or she reinforces the speaker, that is, when he or she produces SVB. However, this SVB of the listener, who becomes a speaker, is not and cannot be reinforced by the speaker, who was mainly conditioned by NVB. To the contrary, SVB of the listener, who is only occasionally is allowed to become a speaker, is only tolerated because it is reinforcing or ‘enabling’ the NVB speaker. 

SVB is only possible for us to the extent that our bodies were changed by it. Since we produce mostly NVB, it is evident that we have been mainly exposed to and conditioned by NVB. The different neural behavior of SVB speakers is audible in the sound of their voice. In SVB speakers speak with a voice which we shall call Voice II. This sound can only be reinforced by  listeners whose bodies have been conditioned to do so. Thus, SVB fits with the refinement of the definition of Verbal Behavior as “Behavior that is reinforced through the mediation of other people, but only when the other people are behaving in ways that have been shaped by a verbal environment or language.” (Skinner, 1986, p. 121). It refers to the listener who speaks! 

Speakers and listeners only interact to the extent they can take turns. In NVB turn-taking happens at a minimum, whereas in SVB turn-taking happens at a maximum. Any conversation consists of a proportion of positive and negative exchanges. Any verbal episode can be considered as more or less noxious or as more or less sound. The conversation in which speakers and listeners voluntarily take turns, is one in which speakers will speak with Voice II. Such an episode consists mainly of SVB instances. 

Speaker’s and listener’s repertoires are learned at different times and under different circumstances, in other words, they are functionally different and analytically separate repertoires (Ledoux, 2014, p. 446). In SVB speaking and listening happen at more or less a similar rate, but in NVB speaking and listening happen at very different rates. Speaking and listening are only “virtually inseparable” during SVB. The “neural behavior of verbal thinking” or the “simultaneous speaking-listening” (Ledoux, 2014, p.446), only occurs due to SVB. In NVB, by contrast, the listener’s covert speech contradicts the speaker’s overt speech and to the extent that the listener can become a speaker (after first being affected by the speaker’s antecedent stimulus, Voice I), to the extent that the listener's covert speech becomes overt, that listener who became a speaker will also distract the NVB speaker. This will even be more the case if the listener who became the speaker experienced more SVB than the NVB speaker. 

By calling the speaker the “verbalizer” and the listener the “mediator” Julie and Ernest Vargas (1990) intended to “better address the nonvocal forms of verbal behavior.” Nevertheless, this change of name has only strengthened the already existing focus on what is now called the verbalizer. It couldn’t and didn’t bring any attention to the sounds of SVB and NVB, two universally occurring subsets of vocal verbal behavior. This writing is addressing the important issue of how mediators are stimulated to become verbalizers, which will enhance SVB and replace NVB.