The ability to produce, perceive, and comprehend speech is a remarkable human achievement. This chapter considers how familiar spoken words are recognized and how the meaning of words and sentences are derived. Speech recognition is discussed in terms of segmenting the auditory signal into different temporal chunks (corresponding roughly to phoneme, syllable, stress pattern). The idea that the meaning of words is grounded in terms of sensory and motor experiences is introduced. Action-based concepts, according to a grounded\/embodied semantics viewpoint, should depend on parts of the brain representing the body and motor production, which are primarily located in the parietal and frontal cortices. The chapter also considers the process of speech production and the extent to which mechanisms related to syntax are independent from semantic-memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n