How the Brain Understands Sarcasm Metaphors and Tone Through Context
Understanding language is about much more than recognizing words and grammar. In everyday conversations, meaning often depends on context, social norms, and how something is said, not just what is said. A new large-scale neuroscience study from researchers at MIT and collaborating institutions sheds light on how the human brain manages this complexity. The findings show that our ability to understand sarcasm, metaphors, indirect requests, and tone is not a single skill, but a combination of three distinct cognitive components.
This research offers one of the most detailed looks yet at pragmatic language ability—the mental process that helps us infer what people really mean when their words alone are not enough.
Why Context Is Essential for Language Understanding
In real-world conversations, people rarely speak in perfectly literal ways. If someone says “lovely weather” during a storm, most listeners immediately recognize sarcasm. That understanding depends on context: the environment, shared knowledge, and expectations about how people normally speak.
Pragmatic language ability allows us to:
- Detect sarcasm and irony
- Understand metaphors and non-literal phrases
- Interpret white lies and polite indirectness
- Recognize meaning from tone, stress, and emphasis
Without these skills, conversations would become confusing and overly literal. The study focuses on how the brain supports these abilities and whether they rely on shared or separate mental processes.
The Researchers Behind the Study
The research was led by Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences. The lead authors were Sammy Floyd, now an assistant professor of psychology at Sarah Lawrence College, and Olessia Jouravlev, now an associate professor of cognitive science at Carleton University.
Their work was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2025 and involved an unusually large sample size for language research, making the findings especially robust.
Moving Beyond Literal Language Research
Much past research on language has focused on how the brain processes vocabulary and syntax. While those elements are essential, they do not fully explain how people understand real conversations. Meaning often changes based on timing, situation, and shared expectations.
For example, the sentence “people are leaving” can convey very different meanings. Said late at night at a party, it suggests the event is naturally winding down. Said early in the evening, it implies the party is not going well. The words are identical, but the interpretation shifts entirely based on context.
The researchers wanted to know whether different kinds of contextual understanding rely on the same underlying cognitive mechanisms or whether they are supported by distinct systems in the brain.
Why This Study Used a Different Approach
One common way to study language in the brain is functional MRI (fMRI), which measures brain activity while participants perform tasks. However, the tasks needed to test pragmatic language are often complex, lengthy, and difficult to perform inside a scanner.
Instead, the researchers used an individual differences approach. This method examines how people perform across many different tasks and looks for patterns in performance. If the same people tend to do well on certain tasks and poorly on others, it suggests that those tasks rely on shared mental processes.
This approach allowed the researchers to study pragmatic language in detail without relying on brain scans during task performance.
Designing a Large-Scale Pragmatic Language Test
The study involved 800 participants, recruited through an online crowdsourcing platform. Each participant completed a comprehensive battery of 20 different tasks, which together took about eight hours to finish.
These tasks were designed to test a wide range of pragmatic skills, including:
- Understanding sarcasm and irony
- Interpreting metaphors
- Recognizing humor
- Detecting meaning changes from emphasis and intonation
- Inferring meaning based on social norms
- Using real-world knowledge to interpret implied meaning
Some tasks focused on social interactions, others on physical or causal reasoning, and others on how changes in tone affect meaning.
The Discovery of Three Distinct Components
After analyzing data from the first group of 400 participants, the researchers noticed a clear pattern. Performance across tasks consistently clustered into three distinct groups. To ensure the results were reliable, they repeated the experiment with another 400 participants. The same three clusters appeared again.
The three components of pragmatic language ability are:
Social Convention-Based Inference
The first component involves understanding meaning based on social rules and expectations. This includes:
- Indirect requests
- Polite refusals
- Irony and sarcasm rooted in social norms
People strong in this area are good at reading between the lines in social situations and understanding why someone might phrase something indirectly rather than stating it plainly.
World Knowledge and Causal Reasoning
The second component relies on general knowledge about how the world works. This type of reasoning helps people infer meaning by understanding cause-and-effect relationships in everyday situations.
For example, understanding why someone might comment on a broken umbrella during a storm requires knowledge of physical reality and practical consequences. This component is less about social rules and more about reasoning logically from real-world facts.
Intonation and Tone Interpretation
The third component focuses on how something is said, not what is said. Changes in emphasis, pitch, and rhythm can completely alter meaning.
For instance, emphasizing different words in a sentence like “I wanted blue and black socks” can signal disappointment, correction, or clarification. This skill depends on sensitivity to prosody—the musical aspects of speech.
Intelligence and Hearing Were Not the Explanation
Importantly, the researchers found that these differences were not explained by general intelligence or basic auditory processing ability. This means pragmatic language skills cannot be reduced to being “smart” or simply hearing well. They are specialized abilities with their own structure.
What This Means for Brain Science
The identification of three distinct pragmatic components suggests that different neural systems may support different kinds of contextual language understanding. Previous research has shown that individual differences often align with brain imaging findings, meaning these components may eventually be mapped to specific brain networks.
Future studies using brain imaging could explore how these pragmatic abilities relate to known systems such as the core language network or the theory of mind network, which is involved in understanding others’ intentions.
Implications for Autism and Communication Differences
This framework could be especially useful for studying people with autism spectrum conditions, who often experience challenges with certain pragmatic skills. Rather than treating pragmatic difficulty as a single issue, researchers could identify which specific components are affected.
The approach may also help explain why some individuals struggle with tone but not sarcasm, or with social conventions but not logical inference.
Cultural Differences in Pragmatic Language
Pragmatic language is also shaped by culture. Different languages and societies have varying norms about directness, politeness, and indirect speech. The researchers suggest that people raised in different cultural environments may rely more heavily on certain pragmatic components than others.
Studying these differences could improve cross-cultural communication and language learning research.
Why This Research Matters
This study provides one of the clearest demonstrations that understanding language in context is not a single mental skill, but a combination of specialized abilities working together. It helps explain why people can be excellent at some forms of communication yet struggle with others.
By breaking pragmatic language into clear components, the research opens new doors for neuroscience, psychology, education, and clinical practice.
Research Paper Reference
Three distinct components of pragmatic language use: Social conventions, intonation, and world knowledge–based causal reasoning
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2424400122
