DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-021-02297-y Abstract One of the most influential ideas within the domain of cognition is that of embodied cognition, in which the experienced world is the result of an interplay between an organism’s physiology, sensorimotor system and its environment. An aspect of this idea is that linguistic information activates sensory representations automatically. For example, hearing the word ‘red’ would automatically activate sensory representations of this color, taste et cetera. But does linguistic information prioritize access to awareness of congruent visual information? Here we show that linguistic verbal cues accelerate matching visual targets into awareness by using a breaking Continuous Flash Suppression paradigm. In a speeded reaction time task, observers heard spoken color labels (e.g. red) followed by colored targets that were either congruent (red), incongruent (green) or neutral (a neutral non-color word) with respect to the labels. Importantly, and in contrast to previous studies investigating a similar question, the incidence of congruent trials was not higher as that of incongruent trials. Our results show that RTs were selectively shortened for congruent verbal-visual pairings, and that this shortening occurred over a wide range of cue-target intervals. We suggest that linguistic verbal information pre-activates sensory representations, so that hearing the word ‘red’ pre-activates (visual) sensory information internally.