In the present symposium we collected research on the effects of language (i.e., instructed or habitual verbal utterances) on cognitive processing such as following instructions, coding responses, object perception and categorization next to revisiting the link between language and intelligence as well as experiments considering accompanying phonological co-activation. The first talk will give a brief overview of the history of language in cognition as well as re-consider the number of stimulus-response episodes for the observation of beneficial effects of evaluative and motivational inner speech. Former research showed reduced interference from incongruent (i.e., mismatch between instructed response and stimulus location) trials when engaging in habitual inner speech. To rule out simple stimulus-response learning as being causal for this observation to be observed, we used a Simon task with a larger stimulus set embedded in a classification task. Stimuli consisted of vertically or horizontally oriented gratings that were presented either left or right or below and above a fixation cross. In analysing the data, we tested whether those nested congruency effects (i.e., judging a grid as vertically oriented when being in the condition where stimuli are presented below or above the fixation cross) are equally affected by increased engagement in habitual inner speech as formerly reported. Those results will help us to further understand the effects of evaluative and motivational inner speech for basic cognitive tasks.