To communicate successfully, people need to track other people’s minds. For example, when your host says ‘it’s getting dark outside’, you may infer that she wants you to leave. Social cognition — the capacity to understand other people’s beliefs, desires or intentions — is vital for using and understanding such non-literal language. Traditionally, the connection between language and social cognition was thought to occur mainly at the sentence level.

“While these global processes are fundamental to human communication, local processes at the word level are equally fundamental, in our view,” says MPI’s Paula Rubio-Fernández, senior investigator and co-author of the study. “Communication is full of social micro-processes that happen in both language production and language comprehension, which recruit social cognition in real time. The interdependence between language and social cognition in human communication is deeper and more pervasive than originally thought.”

Everyday examples of social micro-processes are choosing definite or indefinite articles depending on whether we are talking about something familiar or new to the listener (‘We bought the house’ vs ‘We bought a house’) or choosing demonstratives (‘this cup’ or ‘that cup’) to guide the listener’s attention to the intended referent.

“Recent advances in computational models of social cognition, including our own, offer support for this view, allowing us to model the primary cognitive processes that we represent in other minds. Our findings broaden the scope of the relationship between language and social cognition, relative to traditional accounts,” Rubio-Fernández concludes. “We plan to further this line of work by investigating referential communication in multimodal, naturalistic interaction, focusing not only on speech and sign, but also on gaze and gesture.”