A tripartite structure of pragmatic language abilities: comprehension of social conventions, intonation processing and causal reasoning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".