Abstract: When people speak, they have many choices about how to say what they want to say, even within the confines of trying to communicate a single message. This largely unconscious process – of choosing words and sentence structures – is central language use, but it is poorly understood. In my work, I have argued that people often make choices in order to make the language production process easier for themselves. So why are some words and sentences easier to say than others? In a series of sentence production studies in multiple languages and with children and adults, I investigate various factors that contribute to sentence production choices and discuss implications for the language production system, and language more generally.
