35 Conversation Analysis and Psychology

(i) Much of psychology conceives of language in a noninteractive fashion, as the psychology of grammar and meaning, and as a matter of specifying the mental processes underlying comprehension and production. This is the established domain of experimental psycholinguistics, and of various approaches to language in experimental Social Psychology, such as ‘verb semantics’ models of causal attribution (e.g. Brown & Fish, 1983; Semin & Fiedler, 1988). Such studies typically avoid everyday recorded talk-ininteraction in favor of sets of sentences or vignettes carefully constructed to test hypotheses about mental processing. We will not pursue this line of research in the space available here, being least relevant to CA, but see Edwards and Potter (1993) for a CA-inspired alternative way of approaching the claimed domain of relevance of such studies, which is the nature of people’s everyday causal explanations of events. (ii) Psychology may study ‘dialog’, the scare quotes being there to distinguish most examples of ‘dialog’ from the kind of recorded interaction studied by