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There is mounting evidence that language comprehension involves the activation of mental imagery of the content of utterances (Barsalou, 1999; Bergen, Chang, & Narayan, 2004; Bergen, Narayan, & Feldman, 2003; Narayan, Bergen, & Weinberg, 2004; Richardson, Spivey, McRae, & Barsalou, 2003; Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001; Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). This imagery can have motor or perceptual content. Three main questions about the process remain under‐explored, however. First, are lexical associations with perception or motion sufficient to yield mental simulation, or is the integration of lexical semantics into larger structures, like sentences, necessary? Second, what linguistic elements (e.g., verbs, nouns, etc.) trigger mental simulations? Third, how detailed are the visual simulations that are performed? A series of behavioral experiments address these questions, using a visual object categorization …