Lexical selection

A study by Paulido & Dussias (2020) used a task which asked participants to choose between a target verb and a distractor verb to make a verb+noun collocation e.g. run-carry-business, where run is the target verb, carry the distractor verb and business the noun. So the fact that in this case participants had to choose between two items does not mean they do this in everyday situations.

We do not normally select from anything unless we pause to choose between alternative phrasings. The idea of lexical selection - that one selects a word from amongst thousands of alternatives is wrong. When I say at the bakery 'Could I have a loaf of white bread, please", there are not thousands of alternatives to the word bread. The fact I know thousands of words does not mean that they are all alternatives and it is surely not true that I run through all the words I know (unconsciously, of course, at the speed of electricity) until I come to the word bread.

There is no such thing as a mental lexicon. What there is, is the human being's mastery of a vocabulary, his ability to correctly use the words of any language he knows. That is a skill but not a skill in looking up anything in a mental lexicon.

Bennett & Hacker 2008:143

References:

Bennett, M. R., & Hacker, P. M. S. (2008). History of cognitive neuroscience. New York: Wiley-Blackwell

Pulido, M. F., & Dussias, P. E. (2020). Desirable difficulties while learning collocations in a second language: Conditions that induce L1 interference improve learning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(3), 652-667.