The 3 ways to read between the lines

A A simple conversation with a neighbor on the street can last just long enough to make you a few minutes late for work. But it still requires a lot of complex brain power to achieve this.

To truly understand the meaning of what the other person is saying, you will need to infer the unspoken and hidden meanings behind the words. This might mean deciphering metaphors about storms or black sheep, detecting irony or white lies, receiving dad jokes, or listening for changes in inflection. In longer discussions, your brain may need to do all of this.

In the scientific literature, this type of inference is known as pragmatic language ability, but scientists have not yet understood much about how it works. New research by MIT cognitive neuroscientist Evelina Fedorenko and colleagues shows that these so-called pragmatic linguistic abilities can be grouped into three categories based on the types of inference they require, and that these categories may have similar underlying neural processes. They published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more: »To speak is to launch into fictional worlds»

“Pragmatics tries to understand why someone might say something and what message they are trying to convey given that they express it in this particular way,” Fedorenko, who runs a lab at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, said in a statement.

To gauge their intelligence, the scientists tested 376 study participants on an 8-hour battery of 20 non-literal comprehension tasks, involving topics such as irony, indirect requests, polite deceptions, metaphor and humor, to try to detect individual differences in performance.

They found that the strengths of different participants could be grouped into the following categories: grasping social conventions, interpreting intonation, and making causal inferences based on knowledge of the world. They then replicated their results in 400 new participants and also found that general intelligence and auditory processing skills did not affect the results.

“Language is about conveying meanings, which often requires taking into account many different types of information, such as social context, visual context, or the current topic of conversation,” Fedorenko added.

Understanding social conventions, the authors point out, requires reasoning about the mental states of others and helps people maintain relationships and “save face.” Irony, for example, has been put forward to allow a speaker to express a negative point of view without imposing it on the other person. Intonation allows a speaker to express emotional states and convey nuances of meaning. And reasoning about the world is obviously an essential skill in many life situations.

In future work, the researchers said they want to use brain imaging to see if the three categories correspond to activity in specific regions of the brain.

The findings could help clinicians understand why some people with conditions such as autism have difficulty with certain components of communication, and help scientists design behavioral and brain imaging studies that can better understand how nonverbal communication works.

They want to shed light on what is left unsaid.

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• Kristen French

  Published on December 16, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.