Summary: A large study of 800 adults shows that pragmatic language skills (the ability to understand sarcasm, indirect requests, tone, and non-literal meaning) are organized into three distinct cognitive clusters. These groups are based on knowledge of social rules, understanding of how the physical world works, and sensitivity to speech intonation.
Participants performed similarly on the tasks within each group, indicating shared underlying mechanisms for how the brain interprets meaning beyond literal words. The findings describe a new framework for studying communication differences, including those seen across cultures and in neurodivergent populations.
Key facts
Three core systems: pragmatic skills grouped into social context inferences, physical world reasoning, and tone-based meaning. Context Forms Meaning: Identical sentences carry different interpretations depending on tense, tone, and situational cues. Broad Applications: The framework may clarify communication challenges in autism and cultural variations in reported speech.
Source: MIT
In everyday conversation, it is essential to understand not only the words that are said, but also the context in which they are said. If it’s pouring rain and someone comments about the “nice weather,” you won’t understand their meaning unless you realize they’re being sarcastic.
Making inferences about what someone really means when it doesn’t match the literal meaning of their words is a skill known as pragmatic linguistic skill. This includes not only interpreting sarcasm but also understanding metaphors and white lies, among many other conversational subtleties.
“Pragmatics tries to reason about why someone might say something and what the message they’re trying to convey is given that they’re expressing it in this particular way,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
New research by Fedorenko and his colleagues has revealed that these skills can be grouped based on the type of inferences they require. In a study of 800 people, researchers identified three groups of pragmatic skills that are based on the same types of inferences and may have similar underlying neural processes.
One of these groups includes inferences that are based on our knowledge of social conventions and rules. Another depends on knowledge of how the physical world works, while the last requires the ability to interpret differences in tone, which may indicate emphasis or emotion.
Fedorenko and Edward Gibson, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, are lead authors of the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The lead authors of the paper are Sammy Floyd, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of psychology at Sarah Lawrence College, and Olessia Jouravlev, a former MIT postdoc who is now an associate professor of cognitive science at Carleton University.
The importance of context
Much of the previous research on how people understand language has focused on processing the literal meanings of words and how they fit together. However, to truly understand what someone is saying, we must interpret those meanings based on context.
“Language is about conveying meaning, and that often requires taking into account many different types of information, such as social context, visual context, or the current topic of conversation,” says Fedorenko.
As an example, the phrase “people are leaving” can mean different things depending on the context, Gibson notes. If it’s late at night and someone asks you how a party is going, you can say “people are leaving” to convey that the party is ending and everyone is going home.
“However, if it’s early and I say ‘people are leaving,’ then the implication is that the party isn’t very good,” Gibson says.
“When you say a sentence, it has a literal meaning, but how you interpret that literal meaning depends on the context.”
About 10 years ago, with support from MIT’s Simons Center for the Social Brain, Fedorenko and Gibson decided to explore whether it would be possible to precisely distinguish the types of processing involved in pragmatic language skills.
One way neuroscientists can address a question like this is to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan participants’ brains as they perform different tasks. This allows them to link brain activity in different locations with different functions.
However, the tasks the researchers designed for this study did not lend themselves easily to being performed in a scanner, so they took an alternative approach.
This approach, known as “individual differences,” involves studying large numbers of people as they perform a variety of tasks. This technique allows researchers to determine whether the same underlying brain processes may be responsible for performance on different tasks.
To do this, researchers evaluate whether each participant tends to perform similarly on certain task groups. For example, some people can perform well on tasks that require understanding of social conventions, such as interpreting indirect requests and irony.
The same people might do so only fairly on tasks that require understanding how the physical world works, and poorly on tasks that require distinguishing meaning based on changes in intonation—the melody of speech. This would suggest that separate brain processes are being recruited for each set of tasks.
The first phase of the study was led by Jouravlev, who gathered existing tasks requiring pragmatic skills and created many more, for a total of 20. These included tasks that require people to understand humor and sarcasm, as well as tasks in which changes in intonation can affect the meaning of a sentence.
For example, someone who says “I wanted blue and black socks,” with an emphasis on the word “black,” is implying that they forgot about black socks.
“People really find ways to communicate creatively, indirectly and non-literally, and this battery of tasks reflects that,” says Floyd.
Components of pragmatic ability
The researchers recruited study participants on an online crowdsourcing platform to complete the tasks, which took approximately eight hours to complete. From this first group of 400 participants, the researchers discovered that the tasks formed three groups, related to social context, general world knowledge, and intonation.
To test the robustness of the findings, the researchers continued the study with another group of 400 participants, and this second half was conducted by Floyd after Jouravlev left MIT.
With the second group of participants, the researchers found that the tasks fell into the same three groups. They also confirmed that differences in general intelligence or auditory processing ability (which is important for intonation processing) did not affect the results they observed.
In future work, the researchers hope to use brain imaging to explore whether the pragmatic components they identified are correlated with activity in different brain regions.
Previous work has found that brain imaging often reflects distinctions identified in individual differences studies, but can also help link relevant abilities to specific neural systems, such as the central language system or the theory of mind system.
This set of tests could also be used to study people with autism, who sometimes have difficulty understanding certain social cues. These studies could determine more precisely the nature and extent of these difficulties. Another possibility could be to study people who grew up in different cultures, who may have different norms when it comes to speaking directly or indirectly.
“In Russian, which happens to be my native language, people are more direct. So maybe there are some differences in the way native Russian speakers process indirect requests compared to English speakers,” Jouravlev says.
Funds:
The research was funded by MIT’s Simons Center for the Social Brain, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.
Key questions answered:
A: They include understanding sarcasm, indirect requests, metaphors, white lies, and any meaning that depends on context rather than literal wording.
A: Because each is based on different systems of inference: social norms, knowledge of the world, or interpretation of tone and emphasis.
A: It provides a structured way to study communication differences in neurotypical and neurodivergent individuals and between cultures with different conversational norms.
Editorial notes:
This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor. Magazine article reviewed in its entirety. Additional context added by our staff.
About this research news in cognition, language and neuroscience
Author: Sarah McDonnell
Source: MIT
Contact: Sarah McDonnell – MIT
Image: Image is credited to Neuroscience News.
Original Research: Closed access.
“Three distinct components of pragmatic language use: social conventions, intonation, and causal reasoning based on knowledge of the world” by Evelina Fedorenko et al. PNAS
Abstract
Three distinct components of pragmatic language use: social conventions, intonation, and causal reasoning based on knowledge of the world.
Successful communication requires frequent inferences. Such inferences encompass a multitude of phenomena: from understanding metaphors, to detecting irony and understanding jokes, to interpreting intonation patterns.
Are all these inferences based on a single underlying cognitive capacity, or is our ability to understand non-literal language broken down into dissociable components?
Using an approach that has successfully uncovered structures in other domains of cognition, we examined covariation in behavioral performance on various nonliteral comprehension tasks in two large samples to look for distinct and shared components of pragmatic language use.
In Experiment 1, n = 376 participants each completed an 8-h battery of 20 critical tasks.
Controlling for general cognitive ability, an exploratory factor analysis revealed three clusters, which can be interpreted post hoc as corresponding to i) understanding social conventions (critical for phenomena such as indirect requests, conversational implicatures, and irony), ii) interpreting patterns of contrastive and emotional intonation, and iii) making causal inferences based on knowledge of the world.
This structure was largely replicated in a new sample of n = 400 participants (Experiment 2, preregistered) and was robust to analytic choices.
This research uncovers the structure of the human communication toolkit and may inform our understanding of pragmatic difficulties in people with brain disorders.
The hypotheses raised here about the underlying cognitive abilities can now be evaluated in new behavioral studies, as well as through brain imaging and computational models, to further decipher the ontology of the components of linguistic and non-verbal communication.
