Empirical evidence demonstrating that sentence meaning is rapidly reconciled with the visual environment has been broadly construed as supporting the seamless interaction of visual and linguistic representations during situated comprehension. Based on recent behavioral and neuroscientific findings, however, we argue for the more deeply rooted…

Experiments 1 and 2 examined the time-course of retrieval of phonological, visual-shape and semantic knowledge as Dutch participants listened to sentences and looked at displays of four pictures. Given a sentence with "beker," "beaker," for example, the display contained phonological (a beaver, "bever"), shape (a…