“…Conversation analysis and discourse psychology have now been coupled with sophisticated computational and behavioral methods such as natural language processing and computational linguistics (Graesser, Swamer, & Hu, 1997), eye-tracking (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995), automated body movement (Paxton & Dale, in press;Schmidt, Morr, Fitzpatrick, & Richardson, 2012) and acoustic analysis (Oller et al, 2010;Wyatt, Bilmes, Choudhury, & Kitts, 2008), dynamical systems methods (Riley & Van Orden, 2005;Shockley, Santana, & Fowler, 2003), and more. Language is a complex and multidimensional activity, and our understanding of it-how it evolved, is learned, and is used-must come from integrating such sophisticated methods in naturalistic circumstances, not only from abstract assumptions about linguistic structure that rarely manifest themselves except in preempirical intuitions.…”