Central to the skill of speaking is our ability to select words that appropriately express our intentions, to retrieve their syntactic and phonological properties and to compute the ultimate articulatory shape of these words in the context of the utterance as a whole. The generation of words in speech involves a number of processing stages. This paper discusses a stage of conceptual preparation, which leads to the activation of a lexical concept; a stage of lexical selection, which leads to the retrieval of an appropriate word or lemma from the mental lexicon; a stage of phonological encoding in which phonological words, consisting of phonological syllables are created; a stage of phonetic encoding, which produces a string of syllabic gestural scores, which can eventually be executed during the final stage of articulation.