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.”