A mental model is a cognitive construct that describes a person’s understanding of a particular content domain in the world. This contrasts sharply with much other work in cognitive psychology, which attempts to be domain-independent.
Donald Norman, for example, investigated calculator usage and found that the models constructed by individuals varied considerably from user to user. If we take the time to find out, we see that individuals do differ in the conceptualizations which they form.
An emphasis on individual differences does not mesh very well with the current linguistic paradigm. The individual has been banished from contemporary linguistics. Linguistics studies language but not homo loquena. There are a number of reasons for this.
First, linguistics wants the prestige and status that we bestow on disciplines which are sciences. To achieve this, linguists tend to the abstract and to the universal while ignoring much of the idiosyncratic nature of language use.
the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole became a cornerstone of Chomskyian linguistics. Competence, the abstract linguistic system, became the major interest of linguists; performance, the actual output of language users, was only of passing interest
thinking about language is shaped by a very powerful metaphor which Michael Reddy has named the ‘conduit metaphor. ‘4 According to Reddy, our model of human communication is based on the following:
- Ideas (or meanings) are objects.
- 2. Linguistic expressions are containers.
- 3. Communication is sending.
A speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and then sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who takes the ideas/objects out of the word/containers. What an expression means depends on what meaning the speaker inserted into the container. Since the meaning is in the expression, the recipient need only retrieve the meaning. In this model, the individual hearer contributes nothing — he merely receives.r. Mental models give us a way of bringing the architecture of the individual language processor into linguistics.
