August 17, 2015

August 17, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

After writing my long response to the paper “Talker-specific learning in speech perception” by Nygaard and Pisoni (1998), I feel validated that my discovery of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) makes sense in the light of the research that was done by others. I remember how frustrated I used to feel that nobody wanted to talk about my finding. Something is happening these days that I could have never imagined a couple of years ago: by reading and writing about what others have written, I somehow have become part of the conversation. It seems to me that everybody should want to know about SVB, but the reality is they don’t. In spite of the fact that the lack of SVB used to be a big problem to me, I am different from most people as I have developed an intense longing, which has led to my discovery. Without this longing, I would have never achieved what I have achieved. Most people don’t have passion, which is born out of pain and suffering. At this point, so many good things have happened in my life, so much acknowledgement of SVB has already occurred, that my intense longing for it is gone. I have it every day, it is my life. It is wonderful and I am so happy and content.

Due to my lengthy response to this research paper, I realize once more how  important the speaker-as-own-listener (SAOL) is for SVB. As long as the SAOL is not activated, we will continue to have NVB. We have been told to listen to others, but nobody has ever told us to listen to ourselves while we speak. Once we do that, we are going to have a different conversation than the one which we were used to. The mechanics of SVB and NVB are so incredibly simple: we engage in NVB when other-listening takes president over self-listening, but we engage in SVB each time when self-listing is emphasized over other-listening. In SVB we find out that self-listening includes other-listening, but other-listening excludes self-listening in NVB. The SAOL is activated during SVB, but SAOL is deactivated during NVB.  SVB is a function of environmental variables which activate the SAOL.