A strong case can be made that the cognitive system is designed for guiding action, not, for example, symbol manipulation. This paper reviews empirical work demonstrating the link between action and cognition with special attention to the processes of language comprehension. Next, an embodied cognition framework is sketched for integrating work on language understanding with a more general approach to cognition and action. This general approach considers contributions to action of bodily states, emotions, social and cultural processes, and learning within a framework that generates a dynamic system. This framework is used to consider the notion of distributed cognition and the prospects that technology might induce substantial changes in cognition. The paper concludes that such changes are unlikely.