Daphna Heller (faculty) and colleague Sarah Brown-Schmidt (Vanderbilt University) are giving a talk for online occasional psycholinguistics group Cycle Linguists on Thursday, November 12, from 12 PM to 1:30 PM: "Common Ground is dead. Long live Common Ground!" Registration is available here.
Theories of the role of mental state representations during linguistic communication, inspired by early proposals by philosophers of language and formal linguists, posit representations of shared knowledge and beliefs, or common ground. Alternative accounts posit that successful communication does not require calculating representations of common ground, but instead, that more general cognitive mechanisms give rise to shared or coordinated representations. Despite their differences, what these views have in common is a focus on shared information. Here we argue that views that rely on what is shared as the basis for communication fail to capture many aspects of language use. We propose a novel account of the role of mental state representations for language, where the perspectives of the partners are compared. This proposal accounts for existing data, interfaces with findings from other cognitive domains, and makes novel, yet-to-be-tested empirical predictions.
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