Upon hearing a word, we recollect, both implicitly or explictly, a big load of very diverse information -- a chair might reactivate childhood memories of granny's home, trigger brain circuits for patterned vision, prime the associated word ''table'' and spur the proprioceptive information connected with the sitting position. How does this information compose into a nicely coherent whole? What aspects remain under the surface of our awareness and what information requires instead conscious access to get activated? We will address this question through computational evidence and experimental data across different populations (e.g., sighted vs. blind). These findings point to a theory of (word) meaning where multiple sources of information co-exist (contra both purely embodied and purely symbolic approaches) and possibly characterise neural processing with different spatio-temporal profiles.
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