Good-Enough Production: Selecting Easier Words Instead of More Accurate Ones.

Dominant theories of language production suggest that word choice-lexical selection-is driven by alignment with the intended message: To talk about a young feline, we choose the most aligned word, . Another factor that could shape lexical selection is word accessibility, or how easy it is to produce a given word (e.g., is more accessible than ). To test whether producers are also influenced by word accessibility, we designed an artificial lexicon containing high- and low-frequency words whose meanings correspond to compass directions. Participants in a communication game (total = 181 adults) earned points by producing compass directions, which often required an implicit decision between a high- and low-frequency word. A trade-off was observed across four experiments; specifically, high-frequency words were produced even when less aligned with messages. These results suggest that implicit decisions between words are impacted by accessibility. Of all the times that people have produced , sometimes they likely meant .