On the mental representations originating during the interaction between language and vision

The interaction between vision and language processing is clearly of interest to both cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists. Recent research has begun to create understanding of the interaction between vision and language in terms of the representational issues involved. In this paper, we first review some of the theoretical and methodological issues in the current vision-language interaction debate. Later, we develop a model that attempts to account for effects of affordances and visual context on language-scene interaction as well as the role of sensorimotor simulation. The paper addresses theoretical issues related to the mental representations that arise when visual and linguistic systems interact.