The theory's stress on multiple relations places it in conflict with an important feature of the standard view of lexical selection, which I have called the "two-step theory" of lexical selection [Dell, G. S. & Reich, P. A., 1981, Stages in sentence production: An analysis of speech error data, “Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior” 20, pp. 611-629]. In this theory, which has been advocated by Fromkin [Fromkin, V. A., 1971, The nonanomalous nature of anomalous utterances, “Language”, 47, pp. 27-52] and Fay and Cutler [Fay, D. and Cutler, A., 1977, Malapropism and the structure of the mental lexicon, “Linguistic Inquiry”, 8, pp. 505-520], the main lexicon is ordered such that similar sounding words of the same syntactic category are near to each other. Associated with each word is listing. So, the addresses of phonologically similar words such as "letter" and "lettuce" would be very close. The first step in selection consists of going from a semantic specification to an address, and the second, of going from the address to the word's phonological form. Semantic word substitutions ("letter → envelope") happen in the first step, and phonological word substitutions ("letter → lettuce"), in the second step. [...] the two step theory of selection claims that semantic and phonological factors cannot act together to create a word substitution.
- Dell (2004), Pag. 199-200