Psychophysiological Methods in Second Language Acquisition Research
Studies in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have already benefited from collaborative and interdisciplinary work, drawing from research methodologies such as surveys and scales from psychology, ethnography from anthropology, conversation analysis from sociology, and neuroimaging techniques from neuroscience. Contributing to this repertoire, I record and make use of physiological data to better describe the role of the body during conversational use of language in small group interactions. Working under the assumption that language use is highly influenced by autonomic responsivity to the ongoing interaction, and in turn our bodies are constantly adapting to their surrounding environments, I am interested in how this adaptive autonomic regulation can offer new insights to the current view of the embodiment of talk (Damasio, 1994; Goodwin, 2007; Porges, 2001). More specifically, in this paper I will show how heart rate and skin conductance, the most reliable indicators of autonomic responsivity to external stimuli (Porges, 2009; Shapiro, Jammer, & Goldstein, 2001), can be synced with regular CA transcripts to bring light to key conversational behaviors, such as interjections, overlaps, onsets and ends of turn construction units, taking the floor, silences and pauses, etc. This innovative approach to scientific investigation clearly benefits SLA research because of its contribution to multi-modal discourse analysis of second language users.