January 19, 2016

January 19, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

It would be best to read this text out loud so that you can hear the sound of your own voice. These words make you pay attention to how you sound when you as a speaker produce Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). It may never have occurred to you, but depending on whether you listen to yourself while you are speaking, you are making a different sound. 

Each time that you are not listening to yourself, even while reading this text, you produce Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The quality of the sound of your speaking voice will improve by listening to it, but it deteriorates when you are no longer listening to it. Similarly, your covert private speech becomes coherent and orderly only when you express it in your public speech. By saying out loud what you are thinking, you bring your private speech into public speech and you can listen to what you are thinking. 

You can, of course, also, as meditators have done, quietly observe what you are thinking, but such quiet observation will not and cannot make you listen to yourself. The practice of quiet self-observation about what one is thinking to oneself without expressing it in public speech will only enhance your NVB as your private speech is never really listened to. Listening is an observing-behavior which can only occur while one is speaking. 

In NVB our private speech is not considered to be functionally related to  public speech, kept out of our public speech and silenced. The so-called quieting down of the mind by means of meditation, by ignoring the relationship between our private speech and our public speech, is an illusion. Private speech, referred to as the mind, is misconstrued as it is no longer considered to be part of public speech that now goes on privately within our own skin. Meditation is useless as only by expressing and by listening to our private speech can we achieve peace and SVB. We cannot meditate towards having better communication and relationship.  

January 18, 2016

January 18, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

It is often stated that our speech is impaired because presumably we are not listening to each other. I think the exact opposite is the case:  speech is impaired because we are not listening to ourselves.  Voices of others cannot become conditioned reinforcers for attending to what is  said as long as our own voice has not been listened to and validated. 

Why would someone want to listen to you if you are not listening to him or to her? Besides, we are biologically inclined to listen to those who listen to us. We would not survive if we would listen to those who are not listening to us. Those who are not listening to us threaten us and are perceived as being against us. When autistic children don’t respond to their parent’s vocal instructions, they are said to lack basic listener literacy. The reason why this occurs has not yet been fully considered. 

Whenever the parent speaks with Voice I, he or she has an aversive effect on the child. The child responds to Voice I with avoidance or escape behavior. If, on the other hand, the parent speaks long enough with Voice II, the child will manifest approach behavior and become attentive to learning. Thus, Voice I increases autistic behavior, while Voice II decreases it. 

Since only Voice II can become a conditioned reinforcer for attending, a listener emersion protocol to induce basic listener literacy needs to consist of Voice II commands. As long as there are Voice I commands, such commands reinforce already existing avoidance and escape behavioral patterns. Also, emersion of autistic children in the vocal demands of others cannot and will not bring their attention to how they sound when they themselves are calmly speaking.

January 17, 2016

January 17, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is based on automatic reinforcement. Automatic reinforcement constitutes the correspondence between the sound of your voice which you produce and what hear when you listen to yourself while you speak. Thus, automatic reinforcement of speech occurs because of the joining of your speaking and listening behavior. 

Someone must stimulate you to accomplish SVB, the joining of speaking and listening behavior. This text may stimulate you a little bit, but it would be much better if I could talk with you and let you listen to how I sound while I listen to myself while I speak. I will reinforce you when you ‘parrot’ Voice II. Once you produce Voice II, you will agree with me that reinforcement of Voice II hasn’t happened very often and that is why it is happening at such a low response rate in our lives.  

Students, who have been in my psychology class for the duration of a whole semester, have acquired conditioned reinforcement for the correspondence between listening and speaking behavior, as they were reinforced for the production of Voice II.  In the past Voice II was not reinforcing as nobody told you to listen to yourself. You were only told to listen to others.   

People tell me all the time that they have never listened to themselves prior to me telling them to do so. It often seems as if I am giving them permission to listen to themselves. Once they have been given that permission they experience and understand what SVB is. Prior to learning about this “ear-opener” people report being afraid to listen to themselves and not liking how they sound. New learning becomes possible because conditioned reinforcement results in the behavioral cusp called SVB.

January 16, 2016

January 16, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

One occasional instance of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is not going to make much of a difference. One moment of Voice II, the discriminative stimulus and the consequences of SVB, such as happier relationships and a decrease of problem behaviors and an increase of effective behaviors, cannot prove the validity of this functional relationship.  Only experimentation can give us confidence in the reliability of these functional relations. Moreover, this experimentation must start with self-experimentation and then proceed to other-experimentation. 

First, you must talk out loud and listen to yourself while you speak, all by yourself. This is when you find and explore that you have a sound which is automatically reinforcing. Once you know that you can have SVB on your own, new opportunities to learn reveal themselves as you are now paying attention to the speaker-as-own-listener. By joining and synchronizing your listening and speaking behavior while you speak, you realize that the merging of observing and producing responses seldom happens while you were talking with others, but each time it happened, it produced positive consequences. 

When you are able to share your self-experimentation SVB experience with others, you will have achieved a transformational behavioral cusp. You will know from your self-experimentation, what is needed to make SVB happen in others. Although learning how to listen and how to speak happened independently under influence of special contingencies, your self-experimentation will reveal to you the unique contingency which is needed to link and unite these separately learned behaviors. In SVB speaking and listening happen at the exact same rate of responding.

January 15, 2016

January 15, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

When we look, or better yet, listen to, the postcedent events that will reliably follow Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), we can’t miss the many positive social consequences. SVB results in an increased attention, exploration, playfulness and wonder. The most sublime consequence for the SVB speaker is when the listener becomes a SVB speaker. Then, there occurs an increasingly more refined, better attuned and mutually reinforcing interaction. If SVB can continue, there occurs an increase of SVB instances and a decrease of NVB instances for all the other communicators. The refinement of our interaction will be exciting, energizing, full of humor, dynamic and fulfilling for all those involved. 

If on past occasions these effects have been repeatedly obtained, if listeners who transformed into SVB speakers have contributed to the interaction, if SVB was effective as it was reinforced by many new opportunities for improved and enhanced social relationships, we can predict with high probability: if we listen to ourselves while we speak and switch from Voice I to Voice II, we will be able to engage in SVB, which will then be followed by tremendously beneficial consequences. 

However, as long as we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak, we can’t and don’t differentiate between Voice I and II and therefore we produce high rates of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which has social disintegration and negative emotions as a consequence. NVB will leave us with a different environment than SVB. The energy transfer that occurs between NVB and its consequences will make the listener feel abused as he or she is aversively impacted by the coercive speaker.