February 5, 2016

February 5, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In “Beyond Words: Human Communication Through Sound” (2016) Kraus & Slater write about those who have better “pre-reading skills”, which should perhaps better be called pre-verbal skills.  “The ability to make use of rhythmic cues when perceiving speech has been linked to reading skills.” Those who have this skill are said to be better at “synchronizing.” Before we are able to “separate words into their individual sounds”, however, we must first be able to pay attention to someone’s voice.  Our ability to orient to someone’s voice depends on the conditioning effect of the voice of those who spoke with us when we weren’t able to speak. To the extent that they spoke with us with a soothing, resonant voice, which made us feel safe, accepted and supported, we learned to pay attention to such voices later on, but to the extent that we were exposed to someone who sounded impatient, demanding or angry, we were conditioned, pre-verbally, to adjust to and endure such threatening stimuli. 

In the light of this inevitable conditioning effect of how we sound, it is interesting to consider the relatively high response rate of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and the relatively low response rate of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). In NVB, the speaker doesn’t listen to himself, but forces others listen to him, while in SVB, each speaker listens to himself, due to which there is a total absence of aversive stimulation.  Although SVB has been part of it, a lot of pre-verbal learning has taken place with NVB. Moreover, our ability to align our verbal and nonverbal expressions, to synchronize what we say with how we say it, depends on the joining of our speaking and listening behaviors. Only when our speaking and listening happen at the exact same rate can we produce SVB, but when there is more speaking than listening or more listening than speaking, we inevitably produce NVB.