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        <title>Non-literal Meaning Representation in the Brain during Naturalistic Listening</title>
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    <abstract>Naturalistic language comprehension often involves interpretations that go beyond literal meaning. In continuous narratives, literal and non-literal meanings are tightly intertwined, making them difficult to distinguish computationally. Here, we combined literal sentence representations and human-annotated non-literal interpretations for model-brain alignment. Using fMRI data recorded during passive listening to the Chinese version of The Little Prince, we annotated sentences containing non-literal meaning with human-written interpretations of their implied meaning. We then derived the literal and non-literal representations from LLaMA3.1-8B and evaluated their correspondence with neural activity using whole-brain encoding models. Literal representations aligned strongly with left-lateralized frontotemporal regions, whereas non-literal interpretations showed broader right-hemisphere involvement. Combining the two further improved encoding performance in the bilateral temporal and dorsal frontal cortices, suggesting that naturalistic comprehension engages complementary levels of meaning.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Non-literal Meaning Representation in the Brain during Naturalistic Listening
%A Ma, Zhengwu
%A Huang, Yuhan
%A Wang, Chengcheng
%A Li, Jixing
%Y Voigt, Rob
%Y Warstadt, Alex
%Y Feldman, Naomi
%Y Linzen, Tal
%S Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, CA
%@ 979-8-89176-412-5
%F ma-etal-2026-non
%X Naturalistic language comprehension often involves interpretations that go beyond literal meaning. In continuous narratives, literal and non-literal meanings are tightly intertwined, making them difficult to distinguish computationally. Here, we combined literal sentence representations and human-annotated non-literal interpretations for model-brain alignment. Using fMRI data recorded during passive listening to the Chinese version of The Little Prince, we annotated sentences containing non-literal meaning with human-written interpretations of their implied meaning. We then derived the literal and non-literal representations from LLaMA3.1-8B and evaluated their correspondence with neural activity using whole-brain encoding models. Literal representations aligned strongly with left-lateralized frontotemporal regions, whereas non-literal interpretations showed broader right-hemisphere involvement. Combining the two further improved encoding performance in the bilateral temporal and dorsal frontal cortices, suggesting that naturalistic comprehension engages complementary levels of meaning.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.scil-main.22/
%P 244-257

Markdown (Informal)

[Non-literal Meaning Representation in the Brain during Naturalistic Listening](https://aclanthology.org/2026.scil-main.22/) (Ma et al., SCiL 2026)

• Non-literal Meaning Representation in the Brain during Naturalistic Listening (Ma et al., SCiL 2026)

ACL

• Zhengwu Ma, Yuhan Huang, Chengcheng Wang, and Jixing Li. 2026. Non-literal Meaning Representation in the Brain during Naturalistic Listening. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026, pages 244–257, San Diego, CA. Association for Computational Linguistics.