A tripartite structure of pragmatic language abilities: comprehension of social conventions, intonation processing and causal reasoning

Successful communication requires frequent inferences. In a large-scale individual-differences investigation, we searched for dissociable components in the ability to make such inferences, commonly referred to as pragmatic language ability. In Experiment 1, n=376 participants each completed an 8-hour behavioral battery of 18 diverse pragmatic tasks in English. Controlling for IQ, an exploratory factor analysis revealed three clusters, which can be post-hoc interpreted as corresponding to i) understanding social conventions (critical for phenomena like indirect requests and irony), ii) interpreting emotional and contrastive intonation patterns, and iii) making causal inferences based on world knowledge. This tripartite structure largely replicated a) in a new sample of n=400 participants (Experiment 2), which additionally ensured that the intonation cluster is not an artifact of the auditory presentation modality, and b) when applying Bayesian factor analysis to the entire dataset. This research uncovers important structure in the toolkit underlying human communication and can inform our understanding of pragmatic difficulties in individuals with developmental and acquired brain disorders, and pragmatic successes and failures in neural network language models.