May 31, 2015

May 31, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is the second part of my response to “The Ontogenetic Selection of Verbal Capabilities: Contributions of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior Theory to a More Comprehensive Understanding of Language” by Douglas Greer (2008). In a couple of hours my wife will return from her holiday. I ate a terrific salad from a big wooden bowl. In it was also the left over quinoa and it tasted delicious. I like to make my own food for a change and have enjoyed these couple of days of doing things on my own. I have noticed this before, it is very clear that things are incredibly different when I am by myself. I enjoy having my own rhythm, but I realize I have gotten used to all the things Bonnie does. I also appreciate her and will be happy when she is back again. I have cut a few roses from our garden and put them in vases to welcome her.

I was thinking how weird it is that no behaviorist has caught on to the fact that there is such a phenomenon as Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). It shows that even the vast majority of behaviorists, who consider behavior as caused by environmental variables, are unknowingly trapped by Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Like most people, even behaviorists didn’t succeed in achieving the behavioral cusp in which they listen to themselves while they speak. Although separately evolved listener and speaker behaviors  became somewhat “joined” and created at least some sense of connection between their “observing” and “producing” responses, this connection never resulted in what I would call SVB: speaking in which speaking and listening happen at the same rate and intensity level. In my view the so-called “joining of speaking and listening behavior” in behaviorism is half-hearted. 

Although Skinner has emphasized that language always “involves the joining of observing and producing responses: responses categories that are initially independent’”(Skinner, 1957), in day to day conversation it is quite apparent that even among behaviorists this is mostly not the case. If the “producer-as-own-observer” would be reinforced all the time, we would be having SVB continuously. Unfortunately, we mainly have NVB as only specific instances of the “producer-as-own-observer” are reinforced under specific circumstances, while most instances are neither observed nor reinforced.

Against all odds I was able to go on with SVB, not because it was so often reinforced, but because of what Skinner called “ostensive learning”, that is, “automatic reinforcement” or “Pavlonian second order conditioning.” How did that work? I heard people sounding friendly, patient, calm and peaceful and I felt better producing such a voice than being unfriendly, impatient, stressed and negative. Although for a long time I believed that I was causing my own behavior, because of my discovery I studied behaviorism and found out that I wasn’t and couldn’t be causing it. A child doesn't decide to learn English, it simply learns English from the members of his or her verbal community.

My wife’s domineering mother has left again and the atmosphere is much better now. After she had left I felt relieved and my wife and I were talking with each other in an entirely different manner than was possible when her mother was there. We go on with our way of relating and talking, because we feel better that way. In SVB we talk with a different kind of sound than in NVB. This sound of our voice is a conditioned stimulus, which makes many other new experiences available. 

“The speaker or the producer [of speech] may simply ‘parrot’ the responses of the caregivers, where the response itself reinforces repetition, much like how the emission of music is automatically reinforced” (Skinner, 1957). As a child, I preferred to echo the sound of my mother over the frightening, intimidating sound of my father. I was conditioned by the friendly sound of my mother. “When a child has acquired conditioned reinforcement for correspondence between hearing and saying the child is reinforced by her reproduction of what is heard.” Greer emphasizes that “parroting is not verbal. It becomes verbal only when the child behaves such that a listener mediates the speaker. This mediation function distinguishes the joining of the observing behavior and the producing behavior of language from the joining of other observing and producing behaviors.” My forceful father didn’t mediate my verbal behavior.

My mother was my primary audience, who mediated my speech and my verbal behavioral history has been affected by the experience of the sound of her friendly voice. The foundation for what would lead to my discovery of SVB was not created by my father, but by my mother’s reinforcement of “relations between production and the nonverbal world.” Moreover, “the capacity to match across seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling such that the capacity for sameness across senses was mastered”, could only be learned from someone who had this capacity. I often wondered why I was crying, but crying was my mother’s way of putting it all together. Although people have judged and misunderstood my tears as a sign of pathology, I felt them as restoring wholeness and relief. I used to cry openly, but learned to cry alone. I think that crying is a behavioral cusp and I feel fortunate to have learned it. 

My mother’s voice or anyone who sounded like her became an appetitive conditioned stimulus for me to which I was naturally attracted to, but my father’s voice or anyone who sounded like him, was an aversive conditioned stimulus I was in conflict with if I couldn’t escape from it. I was often scolded and humiliated by him because I wasn’t listening. I tried and I wanted to, but I couldn’t and I failed and was often rejected. The harder I tried, the more I failed. I often felt that if I could have my mother by herself, I would be happy, but that wasn’t possible. She often confused me because she allowed my father’s corporal punishment to be inflicted on me and her other children. My impatient father used to say that those who don’t want to hear, will be made to feel. What he meant by that was that if we didn’t do as he told us to, he would hit us and he often did. I wasn't able to learn much from my father as I was afraid for him. I only was able to learn from those who sounded good. Thus, the “auditory stimulus”, how other people sounded, “came to control multiple responses as a result of specific instructional or environment experiences.”