Warm + fuzzy: Perceptual semantics can be activated even during surface lexical processing ------------------------------------------------------------ **Introduction** According to the embodied cognition view, activation of perceptual semantics (such as visual information for the words ‘white’ or ‘red’, or tactile information for the words ‘warm’ or ‘fuzzy’) should occur even in a relatively shallow lexical decision task. While some studies found this activation, other studies did not. We argue that considering timing of lexical processing might be crucial for detecting the activation of perceptual semantics in this task. **Methods** We designed three experiments addressing this point. We selected visual, tactile, and auditory adjectives (for example, ‘white’, ‘warm’, and ‘loud’, respectively). Three lexical decision experiments assessed reaction times for two stimuli at once (for example, ‘white + fuzzy’). Stimuli were presented either simultaneously (Experiments 1 and 2) or sequentially with short time intervals between them (170 ms vs. 270 ms; Experiment 3). We accounted for word length, frequency, and shallow lexical associations between presented words. **Results** Overall, the results of our three experiments demonstrated that perceptual semantics is activated even during shallow lexical processing, such as in the lexical decision task. We found a consistent advantage for processing visual semantics and a consistent disadvantage for processing haptic semantics. Moreover, we found that the activation of modality information is modulated by the timing of stimuli presentation and the exact combination of semantic modalities. **Discussion** As predicted, we found that the timing of processing modulates activation of perceptual semantics. We showed that perceptual semantics can be activated even during shallow lexical processing. Our results strongly support the embodied view of language semantics.