Lexical choice and word formation in a taboo game paradigm

We investigate the onomasiological question of which words speakers actually use and produce when trying to convey an intended meaning. This is not limited to selecting the best-fitting available existing word, but also includes word formation, the coinage of novel words. In the first two experiments, we introduce the taboo game paradigm in which participants were instructed to produce a single-word substitution for different words so that others can later identify them. Using distributional semantic models with the capability to produce quantitative representations for existing and novel word responses, we find that (a) responses tend to be semantically close to the targets and (b) existing words were represented closer than novel words, but (c) even novel compounds were often closer than the targets’ free associates. In a final third experiment, we find that other participants are more likely to guess the correct original word (a) for responses closer to the original targets, and (b) for novel compound responses as compared to existing word responses. This shows that the production of both existing and novel words can be accurately captured in a unified computational framework of the semantic mechanisms driving word choice.