Understanding whether “lovely weather” denotes sunshine or a sarcastic comment about the rain requires three specific cognitive abilities that operate independently of general intelligence.
In a major study of 800 participants, scientists identified these distinct clusters after testing participants’ ability to interpret “pragmatic language”, the skill of reasoning about why someone said something rather than merely processing the literal words.
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that the ability to read between the lines is not a single intuitive leap but a complex interplay of understanding social conventions, grasping physical-world dynamics, and interpreting vocal intonation.
“Pragmatics is trying to reason about why somebody might say something, and what is the message they’re trying to convey given that they put it in this particular way,” said Evelina Fedorenko, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Context reshapes meaning
To understand the complexity of human communication, the researchers focused on how context reshapes meaning. Edward Gibson, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, illustrated this with the phrase “people are leaving”.
“If it’s late at night and someone asks you how a party is going, you may say ‘people are leaving,’ to convey that the party is ending and everyone’s going home,” said Gibson. “However, if it’s early, and I say ‘people are leaving,’ then the implication is that the party isn’t very good. When you say a sentence, there’s a literal meaning to it, but how you interpret that literal meaning depends on the context.”
The study, which began about 10 years ago with support from the Simons Center for the Social Brain, tasked participants with completing a battery of 20 different assessments designed to capture non-literal communication. The results showed that pragmatic abilities group into three distinct categories:
- Social conventions: This skill involves inferences based on unwritten social rules, such as recognising that an indirect request, such as “it’s cold in here,” is a plea to close a window, or interpreting irony and white lies.
- Physical world knowledge: This relies on understanding how the physical environment shapes meaning, such as the timing of guests leaving a party.
- Intonation interpretation: The final cluster involves reading the “melody” of speech. For instance, realising that emphasising the word “black” in the sentence “I wanted blue and black socks” implies that the black socks were missing.
“People really find ways to communicate creatively and indirectly and non-literally, and this battery of tasks captures that,” said lead author Sammy Floyd, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of psychology at Sarah Lawrence College.
The study was conducted in two phases. The first, led by Olessia Jouravlev, now an associate professor at Carleton University, involved assembling existing tasks and creating new ones to test humour, sarcasm, and intonation.
After analysing the first 400 participants, the team found that the tasks formed three distinct clusters. To test the robustness of the findings, Floyd conducted a second phase with an additional 400 participants, confirming that the tasks clustered into the same groups.
Pragmatic skills
The researchers found that these pragmatic skills were not tied to general intelligence or auditory processing ability. This suggests that separate brain processes are recruited for each set of tasks rather than a single general communication ability.
The researchers believe this framework could help pinpoint specific communication difficulties in people with autism, who often struggle with social cues. It also opens avenues for the study of cultural differences in communication styles.
“In Russian, which happens to be my native language, people are more direct,” said Jouravlev. “So perhaps there might be some differences in how native speakers of Russian process indirect requests compared to speakers of English.”
“Language is about getting meanings across, and that often requires taking into account many different kinds of information — such as the social context, the visual context, or the present topic of the conversation,” said Fedorenko.
