The brain and the act of speech: the verbo-tonal approach

How the brain processes speech and sounds according to Petar Guberina’s verbo-tonal method.

The brain and the act of speech

A global and dynamic vision of the act of speech CLAUDE ROBERGE, KANTO GAKUIN UNIVERSITY, TATEBAYASHI, JAPAN

From a reading of the articles and books written on the Verbo-tonal Method (VTM) by Professor Petar Guberina, the conviction emerges that the method is firmly in place in the twenty-first century. Why? Because its instigator pursued throughout his career the search for the factors most likely to influence the human brain in its learning of languages, whether mother tongue or foreign. These are problems of the same order as those that men had to confront 50 or 500 years ago, in the time of Aristotle and Plato — the same that they pose to themselves in our day, and the same that they will pose, without the shadow of a doubt, in the coming century.

If it were a matter of training mice, monkeys or pigeons, the factors to be drawn upon would present themselves from a different angle, but the primary objective of the verbo-tonal method aims at the human being: the human being who, at certain moments, learns their mother tongue, at others a foreign language; at certain moments cannot pronounce the French /y/ or the English /ð/; suffers from a deafness or an aphasia, or from some delay of language. Certainly one can foresee for the new century the discovery and marketing of ever more sophisticated apparatuses, ever more pointed research results, but the human brain

will remain such as we know it today, and it will not easily allow itself to be dethroned from its pedestal. It is always the same brain which, faithful to itself, behaves in a consequent manner and improves its behaviour at the occasion of each of its successive integrations. Whether it belongs to an Asian or a European, to a member of a tribe not yet influenced by Euro-American culture or to an individual living in one of our most modern cities, it always reacts to the same laws and in an identical manner.

That is why a person having assimilated the principles of this method will be able without major difficulty to pass from the re-education of stammering to that of aphasia and vice versa. It should moreover not be forgotten that this very claim is already implied in the abbreviation “SUVAG”, where S means “System”, U means “universal” — universality in theory as in application — V stands for “Verbo-tonal” and AG for “of Guberina Hearing”. The verbo-tonal is therefore not a system as one ordinarily hears it: providing a more or less happy solution to concrete problems and ceaselessly threatened with being replaced by another more efficacious.

What saves it from this peril is that it presents itself as a global and structured way of conceiving of hearing and the brain in their functioning — in short, as a system. In saying this, I do not for one moment claim that such a re-educator or teacher must cease to instruct themselves as soon as they already know the know-how of integration. Between all these domains, an unnamed author wrote that it was not a question of specialisation, but a simple question of degree: “At the beginning of my teaching of English to francophones, I had the impression of finding myself among the deaf and I worked as I would with the deaf.

I noted that between these adults and the truly deaf, there was only a difference of degree.” Is a normal subject not deaf when faced with a foreign language? Are they not a stammerer? Are they not an aphasic? In one of his lectures, Professor Guberina recounts that, having observed that an adult who hears normally and has developed their brain thanks to their mother tongue hears a foreign language not by the ear but by the brain, the idea came to him to re-educate the profoundly deaf child not through the ear but through the brain, where everything is based on rhythm,

intonation, tension. In this connection, he writes somewhere that the brain “often behaves analogically” or that “at the very least we can explain certain functions of the brain by analogy”. In order to make better progress in the domain of a universal system, I would say — and how many times have I had the experience of this! — that one must double theory with experience and experience with theory; a continual back-and-forth between the two proves necessary.

It is therefore not enough to read books or articles on this method in order to make it one’s own; it is just as necessary to observe it in its application and above all to submit oneself to the test and the fire of practice in order to appreciate its efficacy and well-foundedness. I would say more: the principles of this system concern not only different fields of application but they continue at each stage to inspire its progress and its gropings.

For example, the tandem “rhythm-intonation”, so often presented in Professor Guberina’s writings, remains always topical at the beginner level as at the advanced level, in the learning of a situation of presentation as in that of a situation in which, for example, a philosophical debate would be engaged. This makes me think of the Rubik’s Cube, whose organisation changes as its parts move but which preserves a certain equilibrium of forces.

Such is indeed one of the characteristics of the verbo-tonal method: never to close or shut in learning, never to add bricks or stones one on top of another, but to develop from within and always to leave open a door towards subsequent developments. Each time it is the whole language that is called into question; everything is structured and everything is structuring — understand: global. From the same perspective, there is not, properly speaking, a methodology of teaching or of learning proper to each language.

All human languages are learned in the same way: the optimal elements of hearing, of integration of a language are the same as those of another language. There is therefore no psycho-linguistics proper to English different from a psycho-linguistics of German. The way of perceiving and integrating languages, the difficulties, the means of overcoming them, do not change.

In order to present the VTM better, I should like to compare it to writings issuing from modern phonetic science. Not to criticise the latter, but rather with the aim of better bringing out the principal characteristics that make for the originality of this method. Indeed, God knows that Professor Guberina himself has always shown himself benevolent and respectful towards the phoneticians