Recent years have seen rapid technological development of devices that can record communicative behavior as participants go about daily life. This paper is intended as an end-to-end methodological guidebook for potential users of these technologies, including researchers who want to study children’s or adults’ communicative behavior in everyday contexts. We explain how long-format speech environment (LFSE) recordings provide a unique view on language use and how they can be used to complement other measures at the individual and group level. We aim to help potential users of these technologies make informed decisions regarding research design, hardware, software, and archiving. We also provide information regarding ethics and implementation, issues that are difficult to navigate for those new to this technology, and on which little or no resources are available. This guidebook offers a concise summary of information for new users and points to sources of more detailed information for more advanced users. Links to discussion groups and community-augmented databases are also provided to help readers stay up-to-date on the latest developments.

Participants in conversation who recurrently discuss the same targets require fewer and fewer words to identify them. This has been attributed to the collaborative elaboration of conceptual pacts, that is, semantic coordination. But participants do not only coordinate on the semantics of referring expressions; they also coordinate on how to do the task, that is, on procedural coordination. In a matching task experiment ( n = 22 dyads), we examined the development of four aspects of procedural coordination: Card placement (CP), implicit generic coordination (IGC), explicit generic coordination (EGC) and general procedural coordination (GPC) in two conditions (the classic condition where targets remain the same over trials, and a new cards condition, where they change at each trial, thus increasing the difficulty of semantic coordination). Procedural coordination constituted almost 30% of the total amount of talk in the matching task. Procedural coordination was more effortful when semantic coordination was more difficult and the four aspects of procedural coordination developed differently depending on participant roles.

In psychology, we tend to follow the general logic of falsificationism: we separate the ‘context of discovery’ (how we come up with theories) from the ‘context of justification’ (how we test them). However, when studying human interaction, separating these contexts can lead to theories with low ecological validity that do not generalize well to life outside the lab. We propose borrowing research procedures from well-established inductive methodologies in interaction research during the process of discovering new regularities and analyzing natural data without being led by theory. We introduce research procedures including the use of naturalistic study settings, analytic transcription, collections of cases, and data analysis sessions, and illustrate these with examples from a successful cross-disciplinary study. We argue that if these procedures are used systematically and transparently throughout a research cycle, they will lead to more robust and ecologically valid theories about interaction within psychology and, with some adaptation, can enhance the reproducibility of research across many other areas of psychological science.

Sound symbolism is increasingly understood as involving iconicity, or perceptual analogies and cross-modal correspondences between form and meaning, but the search for its functional and neural correlates is ongoing. Here we study how people learn sound-symbolic words, using behavioural, electrophysiological and individual difference measures. Dutch participants learned Japanese ideophones —lexical sound-symbolic words— with a translation of either the real meaning (in which form and meaning show cross-modal correspondences) or the opposite meaning (in which form and meaning show cross-modal clashes). Participants were significantly better at identifying the words they learned in the real condition, correctly remembering the real word pairing 86.7% of the time, but the opposite word pairing only 71.3% of the time. Analysing event-related potentials (ERPs) during the test round showed that ideophones in the real condition elicited a greater P3 component and late positive complex than ideophones in the opposite condition. In a subsequent forced choice task, participants were asked to guess the real translation from two alternatives. They did this with 73.0% accuracy, well above chance level even for words they had encountered in the opposite condition, showing that people are generally sensitive to the sound-symbolic cues in ideophones. Individual difference measures showed that the ERP effect in the test round of the learning task was greater for participants who were more sensitive to sound symbolism in the forced choice task. The main driver of the difference was a lower amplitude of the P3 component in response to ideophones in the opposite condition, suggesting that people who are more sensitive to sound symbolism may have more difficulty to suppress conflicting cross-modal information. The findings provide new evidence that cross-modal correspondences between sound and meaning facilitate word learning, while cross-modal clashes make word learning harder, especially for people who are more sensitive to sound symbolism.