I guess I should have foregrounded myself a bit. I'm interested in this because of the history of linguistic studies, and observations made by theorists such as Ferdinand De Saussure and Wittgenstein. The general modernist consensus has been that linguistic symbols, like "chair," have no connection to the actual object that we call "chair," and that symbols for "chair" evoke different feelings for everyone. And so some theorists suggest that we no longer talk of common languages but of personal languages.
So I was just interested in the role of symbols in speech-impaired cognition in general, and more specifically how these symbols are constructed to represent a perception of reality, or something of the sort. Just curious.
