Grounding in Communication - Criticisms

Criticisms

The creation of a common set of mutual knowledge is an unobservable event which is hardly accessible to empirical research. Therefore it would be needed a god-like point of view to look into the participants' heads. By modeling the common ground from one communication partner’s perspective is a model used to overcome this ambiguity. Even so, it is difficult to distinguish between the concepts of grounding and situation awareness.

Distinguishing between situation awareness and grounding in communication can provide insights about how these concepts affect collaboration and furthering research in this area. Despite revealing evidence of how these theories exist independently, recognizing these concepts in conversation can prove to be difficult. Often both of these mechanisms are present in the same task. For example, in a study where Helpers had a small field of view and were able to see pieces being manipulated demonstrates grounding in communication. However, situation awareness is also present because there is no shared view of the pieces.

Another criticism of common ground is the inaccurate connotation of the term. The name appears to relate to a specific place where a record of things can be stored. However, it does not account for how those involved in conversation effortlessly understand the communication. There have been suggestions that the term common ground be revised to better reflect how people actually come to understand each other.

Grounding in communication has also been described as a mechanistic style of dialogue which can be used to make many predictions about basic language processing. Pickering and Garrod conducted many studies that reveal, when engaging in dialogue, production and comprehension become closely related. This process greatly simplifies language processing in communication. In Pickering and Garrod's paper Toward a Mechanistic Psychology of Dialogue, they discuss three points that exemplify the mechanistic quality of language processing:

1. By supporting a straightforward interactive inference mechanism

2. By enabling interlocutors to develop and use routine expressions

3. By supporting a system for monitoring language processing

Another component that is essential to this criticism on Grounding in Communication is that successful dialogue is coupled with how well those engaged in the conversation adapt to different linguistic levels. This process allows for the development of communication routines that allow for the process of comprehending language to be more efficient.