Eye movements to spoken words' referents and near-referents have been widely 
used as an indicator of comprehension in psycholinguic research. It is an open 
question though whether these eye movements themselves, either by providing 
visual information that matches the linguistic input (as suggested by priming 
studies) or by providing access to memory traces linked to certain locations 
in the visual environment (as suggested by the spatial indices theory), might 
have a beneficial effect on linguistic processing. This presentation is  about 
three studies that examined the interplay between looks to spoken words' 
depicted referents and the comprehension of these words. The visual world and 
lexical decision paradigms were combined to assess word comprehension and the 
deployment of visual attention simultaneously. These studies' results suggest 
that speech-contingent eye movements do indeed ease word comprehension, by 
providing visual information that matches the word.