Introduction to the special issue on language–vision interactions

Researchers in psycholinguistics are increasingly interested in the question of how linguistic and visual information are integrated during language processing. In part, this trend is attributable to the use of the so-called “visual world paradigm” in psycholinguistics, in which participants look at and sometimes manipulate objects in a visual world as they listen to spoken utterances or generate utterances of their own. In this introductory article to the Special Issue on Language-Vision Interactions, we briefly describe the history of attempts to look at the integration of language and vision, and we preview the articles appearing in the special issue. From those articles, it is clear that recent work has dramatically expanded our understanding of this important question, a trend that will only accelerate as theoretical and methodological advances continue to be made.