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.