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, kitten. Another factor that could shape lexical selection is word accessibility, or how easy it is to produce a given word (e.g., cat is more accessible than kitten). To test whether producers are also influenced by word accessibility, we designed an artificial lexicon with high- and low-frequency words with word meanings corresponding to compass directions. Participants in a communication game (total N = 181 adults) earned points by producing compass directions, often requiring an implicit decision between a high- vs low-frequency word. A trade-off was observed across four experiments, such that 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 cat, sometimes they likely meant kitten.