"Word choice is guided by analogy"

In a lecture* Douglas Hofstadter gave a very interesting account about how the mind decides which word to choose in a given context to communicate/verbalize an inner concept. He points out that "...word choice is guided by analogy". The "lexical-item choice is always a fight". A fight between many instances, he means. So in order to communicate a particular idea our mind is presented with many word options to choose from. The best word will be chosen by an analogy-evaluation process, i.e. how well a given word matches what is to be expressed. Sometimes a single word "towers above the others" and is good enough to convey what we want to communicate. Some other times there are a bunch of competing words, and choosing from them turns into a mental "fight".
Hofstadter illustrates this fight by showing a histogram in which each word has a "likelihood" of matching the idea. If one words does, then it has the highest value and is chosen. If a couple of words do, then chances are that we by mistake blend them into a single word. This shows the mechanism that operates in our mind.

For further reading see:

• Hofstadter, D. (2001), Analogy as the Core of Cognition in The Analogical Mind, Gentner, Holyak and Kokinov, Eds. The MIT Press.
• Hofstadter, D. (2012), The Essence of Thought. Basic Books (to be released September 11, 2012)

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* Feb. 6, 2006 Presidential Lecture Stanford (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8m7lFQ3njk)