Gün R. Semin

Kurt Lewin Institute, Free University Amsterdam

We live in a world where words have taken over from physical or nonverbal
forms of communication. With words, information about human interaction and
other events is communicated and stored. Words have become the currency of an
information culture that has grown increasingly incapable of dealing with
nonverbal action. Indeed, humanity was on the way toward losing its reliance on
nonverbal communication the moment that it realized that words could capture
more complex forms of reality and abstract these forms in a more economical
manner. With words, people engage in social interaction, and through a better
understanding of words and their use people can begin to appreciate
communication as joint action. Many actions essentially involve
communication and are produced by using language. It is therefore not
unreasonable to expect that the study of language and its use can contribute to an
informative appreciation of not only the communicative processes that drive joint
action or symbolic communication but also of the psychological processes
(cognitive, motivational, emotional). The present chapter is intended as all
attempt and a contribution to elucidate the interface between symbolic
communication as mediated by language and cognition.

Social behavior and interaction are enabled by means of symbolic
communication. This insight is certainly not recent; it is one of the main
contributions of G. H. Mead (e.g., 1934). In the Meadian tradition of social
psychology, forms of language are treated not merely as mediators of social
interaction but also of cognition, consciousness, and, inevitably, of the self (cf.
Rock, 1979). This broader perspective is also central to socio-cultural theory
and semiotic mediation (cf. Wertsch, 1991, 1994; Wertsch & Rupert, 1993).
Communication is seen as a joint activity that is mediated by the use of a
variety of tools. The most significant of these tools is undoubtedly language.
The idea that human action is mediated by tools is also a central theme of
Vygotsky's work and of the sociocultural approach that attempts to examine
human action in terms of its cultural, institutional and historical embeddedness
(cf. Wertsch, 1991). As Vygotsky ( 1978) noted, the introduction of culture
through language affects the nature of interpersonal functions. "It does this by
determining the structure of a new instrumental act just as a technical tool alters

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