 Empirical findings work against a common presupposition in this debate. We now know that language processing is not completely detachable from imagistic cognition. One important set of findings come from the ‘dual coding theory’ (Paivio 1971, 1986), according to which linguistic representations themselves are partly constituted (or at least necessarily accompanied) by mental imagery and this explains why concrete words (that are accompanied by more determinate mental imagery) are easier to recall than abstract words (that are accompanied by less determinate and in some cases very indeterminate mental imagery).