October 2, 2015

October 2, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my sixth response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). I agree with the authors who state “In order for the effects of selection by reinforcement to be understood, the ‘‘natural lines of fracture’’ must be honored at all levels of organization (Churchland & Sejnowski, 1992)—behavioral, neural, and cellular (Field; Galbicka; Hutchison; see Palmer, Donahoe, & Crowley, 1985). However, when it comes to the “natural lines of fracture” delineating nonverbal aspects of how we speak, understanding is not enough. Experience, of course, is an aspect of understanding, but when we are involved with reading and writing that experience is absent. Even when we are involved in conversation that experience of talking is not getting much attention.

When the speaker doesn’t pay attention to how he or she speaks, that is, when the speaker doesn’t listen to him or herself while he or she speaks, he or she produces Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The speaker doesn’t and can’t embody what he or she says in NVB as there is no alignment between his or her verbal and nonverbal expression. In NVB all the attention of the listener is forced to go to what the speaker is saying. In other words, the verbal presumably is more important than the nonverbal in NVB. One aspect of this verbal bias is that printed language (in scientific papers, but also in books, newspapers, websites, magazines and text messages) supposedly is more important than spoken language. However, nonverbal signals of the speaker, that is, his or her sound, affects the listener in profound ways, which we have yet to fully investigate and acknowledge. This cannot be accomplished by writing or reading and has to be done while we are speaking.

Only while we talk can we delineate the difference between NVB and Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and experience the sound of our own voice. I did an experiment in my classroom. I had already explained to my students the difference between SVB and NVB and I let them listen to an audio sound sample of SVB and NVB in my Dutch native language. Since they didn’t understand my Dutch, they could only identify whether it was SVB or NVB by the sound of my voice. The entire class recognized SVB as SVB and NVB as NVB. In my next experiment I will make sound samples of SVB and NVB and use different speakers than myself and different languages. I predict they will just as readily identify the SVB and NVB of the unfamiliar speakers in unfamiliar languages.

It is important to analyze how we sound while we talk as in addition to what the speaker says verbally, his or her voice induces nonverbally negative or positive affect in the listener. “What is considered a unitary response at the behavioral level (e.g., lever pressing) is an expression of the concerted firing of a large population of cortical and motor neurons at the neural level (e.g., Georgopoulos, 1990, in press). It is not that one level of analysis is ‘‘right’’ and the other ‘‘wrong,’’ but that one or the other level is more or less appropriate for the phenomenon under study.” I want the phenomenon under study to be how we interact.

Only if we are stimulated to activate the speaker-as-own-listener, only if the speaker begins to listen to him or herself while he or she speaks, will the speaker begin to notice the appropriateness and the necessity of this level of analysis.  Only if the speaker receives the feedback from the listener about how he or she is impacting the listener, will the speaker be able to achieve and maintain SVB. During NVB, by contrast, the speaker is not receiving any feedback from the listener. Besides, the listener who doesn’t object to the NVB speaker is as much conditioned by NVB as the NVB speaker him or herself and is unable to give him or her any feedback. The mechanical, unconscious and aversive spoken communication, which is NVB, is maintained by the speaker and by the listener. We haven’t explored that our environment is causing our vocal verbal behavior and think of speakers as being separate from listeners.

This morning I recorded more SVB and NVB samples from the internet. I had already made an audio sample of my own voice and had tested it in class.  Today I also made audio recordings of SVB and NVB in French and in German. My students listened to the six audio samples in a language they didn’t know: in Dutch, French and German. I picked these samples and labeled them as SVB or NVB. My students already knew about the difference between SVB and NVB as I had explained it to them. Today is the fifth week of this semester, so we have met eight times. In other words, eight trials were sufficient to condition them to be able to discriminate between SVB and NVB.  The Dutch sample of NVB came first and then came the Dutch sample of SVB. This was followed by a French sample of SVB and then a French sample of NVB. Lastly, the students listened to a German audio version of NVB and then to a SVB sample. As I predicted, there was unanimous agreement about SVB and NVB in each language. Students who didn’t know Dutch, French or German were able to differentiate between SVB and NVB based on what I had taught them in the eight trials or classes we have met. Hundred percent interrater reliability demonstrates the validity of these universal categories. I am reminding the reader that the authors insist that “the ‘‘natural lines of fracture’’ must be honored at all levels of organization” and that SVB and NVB are therefore response classes which are of utmost importance. Besides the Caucasian American students, there are also Latino students from Mexico, Bolivia and Chile, as well as students from Russia, Hungary, Vietnam, Laos, China and Japan in my class. In other words, I have a diverse population in my class who in spite of their cultural differences was able to discriminate between SVB and NVB. The unanimous nonverbal agreement was really powerful. Some students commented that nonverbal agreement is the necessary condition for verbal agreement. Everyone recognized the difference in how people sound when they are talking AT or WITH each other and everyone agreed that we need to listen to how we sound while we speak if we want to be able to talk WITH each other.