Evolution is a tinkerer modifying existing features. Have older cognitive capacities been recruited for language? Older cave paintings show a superior visual capacity for rendering both detail and motion (Folgerø, Johansson & Stokkedal 2021, i.a.). Cave paintings became increasingly symbolic, which suggests a shift from visual to symbolic culture with implications for both language and visual acuity. Relations between vision and language suggest an exaptation where vision became involved in a symbolic language function. In the domain of vision, several researchers have found that language interferes with visual tasks (Almor 2008; Dessalegn & Landau 2013; Huettig & McQueen 2007; i.a.). The extent of interference may develop with maturation of language skills. Studies show that sound and music activate visual tasks (Pérez-Bellido, Spaak & de Lange 2023), and sound and vision are not independent (Wiens, Szychowska & Nilsson 2016). Recently, Chabal, Hayakawa & Marian (2022) found that visual input automatically activates language, regardless of other factors. In linguistics, we find linguistic grammar and meaning regularly linked to bodily perception by imagery and visual representations (Langacker 2008, i.a.). This suggests that the evolution of cognitive capacities within the cultural niche, constituted by language, may have built on pre-existing structures for visual perception. If processing language, and speech in particular, draws on similar or overlapping resources (representational or procedural), then speech and vision still interact. We present a study showing a significant increase in missed changed objects (but not faces) when listening to unrelated speech while first exposed to the images. In another study, we found more missed name changes when viewing a blank screen compared to viewing a detailed picture, and names were more often missed compared to a change in voice quality. Such specific interferences of language with object recognition, but not face or voice recognition, provide evidence for a specific biological evolutionary effect of a specific cultural phenomenon.