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Schemes were Piaget’s most important concept. Through work of Vergnaud, schemes were connected to representations and theoretical models from Piaget were connected to principal insights from Vygotsky. We suggest that the scheme concept can be elaborated further by detailing the relationship between schemes and semiotics. We consider a case of an adult student’s work on a situation involving average speed. Linguistic representations in the problem formulation triggers two separate schemes for the student, one associated to the speed concept and one to the arithmetic average. By identifying exemplary phenomena in the presented case, we show how previous theory connecting schemes and representations can be extended to allow alternative explanations for a well-known class of students’ errors.