Nijmegen, 23 June 2026 – Paula Rubio-Fernández has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the project COMMON_GROUND. The grant, one of the European Research Council's most prestigious and competitive forms of funding, will allow Paula to test and develop a new theory of how people build and manage the shared understanding that makes communication possible.
What is common ground?
Every conversation relies on common ground: the information speakers and listeners assume to share. A simple question like "Did Maria arrive?" only works because both people already know who Maria is and where she was supposed to arrive. Despite more than 60 years of interdisciplinary research, scientists still don't fully understand which cognitive abilities underlie the use of common ground in conversation, or how it actually comes about during social interaction.
Paula's project sets out to change that.
The project
Common ground: Testing a cultural evolutionary theory (ERC AdG 2025)
"Every conversation we have requires keeping track of our common ground with our conversational partners. That’s why talking to strangers is so different from talking to those close to us," says Paula. "Even if common ground is a key notion in the language sciences, we still don’t understand how it’s built through interaction and managed during conversation. With this project, we want to crack open those fundamental questions by using the latest technology to investigate real-time multimodal interaction in infants, children, and adults across six languages."
Paula's theory is that common ground isn't something that simply exists between two people: it emerges through a reinforcement cycle of three cognitive capacities; namely, joint attention, joint memory, and the use of reference systems. "Each capacity feeds into the others," she explains. "You experience something together, you remember having experienced it together, and you signal having shared it when you refer back to it - and that loop is, I propose, how common ground actually emerges and gets reinforced across conversations."
To test this theory, the project won't rely on tightly controlled lab tasks alone. Instead, children and adults will first be immersed in genuinely shared experiences, with multimodal data (including dual eye-tracking, speech, and gestures) capturing how attention and reference play out together in real, naturalistic interaction, and how they affect memory for those shared experiences. Later conversations about those experiences will then show how common ground is managed across different ages, languages, and cultures.
"This is the first time anyone's tried to trace the common ground cycle in real interaction, rather than studying these three capacities separately," Rubio-Fernández adds. "If my predictions are right, the results won’t only tell us something new about communication: Our findings will speak to research areas as diverse as philosophy and child development, as well as building AI that can track common ground within and across interactions with humans."
About the ERC Advanced Grant
ERC Advanced Grants support established research leaders with a track record of significant achievements, giving them the freedom to pursue ambitious, high-risk, high-reward projects over five years. Paula's grant is part of the 2025 funding round.