ABSTRACT
The study of ‘language and mind’ aims to model the workings of the mind in relation to language, but, unlike the study of ‘language and the brain’ (see Chapter 11 below), does not attempt to relate its findings to physical reality. A person working on ‘language and mind’ is trying to produce a map of the mind which works in somewhat the same way as a plan of the London Underground. The latter provides an elegant summary of the connections in the system but makes no attempt to specify the exact distance between stations or the physical make-up of the trains. Since structures and connections in the mind are inevitably unobservable, researchers put forward hypotheses based on fragmentary clues. This accounts for the high degree of controversy which surrounds almost all areas of the subject. The label most usually given to the study of ‘language and mind’ is psycholinguistics, a term which is often perceived as being trendy. It has therefore been somewhat overused in recent years, and can be found applied to just about any linguistic topic. Psycholinguistics ‘proper’ can perhaps be glossed as the storage, comprehension, production and acquisition of language in any medium (spoken, written, signed, tactile). It is perhaps useful to distinguish it from a somewhat wider field, ‘the psychology of language’, which deals with more general topics such as the extent to which language shapes thought, and from a wider field still, ‘the psychology of communication’, which includes non-verbal communication such as gestures and facial expressions.
